Does OpenOffice have 11 million active U.S. users? | The Open Road - CNET News

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Does OpenOffice have 11 million active U.S. users?

While Microsoft Office is actively used by roughly 50 percent of U.S. Internet users, according to a 2,400-strong survey administered by ClickStream Technologies , 5 percent of U.S. Web users also actively use the open-source productivity suite OpenOffice.org.

Importantly, ClickStream wasn't measuring installations. It was measuring use. The company actually installed client-side software that tracked which applications the users were running. To have OpenOffice in use across 5 percent of U.S. Internet users is pretty amazing.

How many people does this translate into? According to recent data , there are 303 million people living in the United States, 72.5 percent of which have Internet access. This suggests that of a population of 219 million U.S. Internet users, nearly 11 million actively use OpenOffice.

In other words, OpenOffice is not a niche geek phenomenon. With more than 46 million downloads of version 3.0 alone, OpenOffice could prove unpleasantly disruptive to Microsoft's desktop business.

True, 5 percent U.S. market share doesn't sound like much, but an estimated 11 million people interacting with OpenOffice on a daily basis sounds like an incredible beachhead for much broader ...

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