Study Finds Google Docs Struggles to Gain Foothold in Productivity Suite Market Dominated by Microsoft

A timely reality check; see the full article for more details

From May to November 2008, ClickStream Technologies' standing panel of adult U.S. internet users showed that use of free productivity applications such as Google Docs and OpenOffice remains low, while Microsoft Office is in use by over 50% of adult U.S. internet users and shows no signs of declining popularity.¹

Of all free productivity applications observed, OpenOffice (a client application) was the most popular, in use by 5% of all users. OpenOffice also had the heaviest and highest frequency of use among free apps, with an average of 548 clicks performed and 8.7 days of use per user.

Google Docs (a web-based application) was the 2^nd most popular free productivity app, used by 1% of users. Google docs also had the lightest use of all productivity apps, with an average of 40 actions performed in the app (compare with 548 in OpenOffice and 1,797 in Microsoft Word), and the fewest average days used during the 6-month period. Although 1% of users had Gears installed on their machine, there was no evidence of its use in conjunction with Google Docs, nor did any user click on “Offline” or “Get Google Gears now” in their Docs account.

Study Finds Google Docs Struggles to Gain Foothold in Productivity Suite Market Dominated by Microsoft