Microsoft Office market grip loosens as the cost of free drops

31 May 2014 by Steve Blum
, , , , ,

How much more popular do the descendants of OpenOffice need to be before they reache a tipping point? That is, the point at which open source productivity apps tip Microsoft Office into a terminal downhill market share slide.

The answer is not much. The Apache Software Foundation says that its child – Apache OpenOffice – has been downloaded more than 100 million times. That doesn’t represent the size of the user base by a long shot – the figure would include downloads of updates and browsing by the curious – but it’s not unreasonable to think it’s somewhere in the tens of millions range, albeit at the lower end.… More