OpenOffice’s Strength in Europe
Italo Vignoli, member of the OpenOffice.org project and a PR professional from Italy, estimates that OpenOffice is competing very strongly in Germany, France and Italy.
As always, measuring users of OpenOffice or any open source program is very difficult, if not impossible. Vignoli carefully reviews some information that is known, and extrapolates to the conclusion that OOo is a very strong competitor in a number of European countries:
“If we look at OpenOffice.org, the three markets where the open source office suite is competing most successfully with Microsoft Office are probably Germany, France and Italy, followed by other European markets like Spain and the Netherlands. In Italy, where I have the updated numbers, we are hitting today [April 18] – maybe while I’m writing this post – one million downloads since January 1st, 2008 (over 350,000 since the announcement of OOo 2.4 in late March). Although we don’t have Microsoft figures for Office 2007, we estimate a maximum of 1.8 million licenses sold in 2008.”
Based on the daily activities of local communities, Vignoli estimates that Germany and France are downloading and migrating to OOo even more quickly than Italy.
He has a message for Microsoft and its marketing propaganda team: “Please, be realistic. We’re eating your pie, quickly. We’re hungry.”