OpenOffice.org is the perhaps biggest threat to Microsoft’s office suite Office 2007 and when the final version of OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released the developers were rewarded with overloaded servers thanks to the great demand. OpenOffice.org has since then announced that version 3.0 set a new download record with more than 3 million downloads during the first week. Even if it is an impressive figure it is perhaps even more interesting who downloaded the suite.
OOo is a multiplatform project and beside the Windows platform there is a large user base that Office 2007 doesn’t reach. You might thank that Linux and Mac users make up the bigger portion of the downloaders, but according to OpenOffice.org’s download measurements that is not the case. A whopping 80% of those who downloaded OOo 3.0 was using the Windows operating system. This means that they could just as well be using Microsoft’s Office suite, but the big difference is of course that OpenOffice.org is free of charge, unlike Microsoft’s suite.
Even though OpenOffice.org is free and a well functioning alternative to Office 2007, the 3 million downloads is just a fraction of what Microsoft’s Office suits is said to reach out to. Microsoft claims to have more than 550 million Windows users that also uses its Office suite.
