Office Suites: Who's Number Two?
It's nothing new to acknowledge that Microsoft's Office suite of applications is number one in sales. According to this article on c|net news.com, MS has 95 percent of the market. What is interesting is who is number two.
Go ahead, take a guess. Nope. Try again. Wrong. It's Apple's iWork. It seems the long-time second place suite, Corel's WordPerfect Office fell from second to third last year.
To be sure, iWork doesn't have all the applications that, for instance, Office Professional or WordPerfect Office X3 Professional has (e.g., iWork doesn't have a spreadsheet). In addition, it is surprising that an application that runs only on Macs, versus one that runs on PCs has taken second place. So take the article with a grain of salt.
Nonetheless, if true, this does not bode well for WordPerfect. I should note I'm not a big fan of WordPerfect. To this day it is full of bugs that will cause your document to go up in smoke. But, I believe, competition improves the breed and Microsoft's Office could stand some improving.
To a lesser extent, Microsoft should also be concerned. According to the article, the split between iWork and MS Office on the Mac platform is about 17 percent versus about 82 percent. Seventeen percent of the market on Macs is a large percentage when you consider MS Office, as noted earlier, holds about 95 percent of sales, overall.
Aloha!
Comments
I find your comments re WordPerfect interesting. I do fear for it's demise and regret with extreme predudice Novell's actions that left the door wide open to MS. I've been using the various versions since I got my first 386 pc and I don't believe I've ever had a document "go up in smoke." I have experienced hardware problems, OS problems (pre-NT4), and WP problems - but I haven't lost documents to anything other than one major hardware failure and a couple of operator errors. MS applications, however, have managed to crash every OS I've used, sometimes regularly - I can't speak for XP as I'm still using Win2K. The only fix my collegue and I could find for one of his Word documents was to import it to WP where the problem was corrected in minutes. I'm referring to larger documents here, even broken into segments they are often 50+ pages with imbedded tables and images. Stepping down from the stump now.
Posted by: Paul | January 24, 2006 09:27 AM
I wonder how OO is doing in market share. Of course if you look at sales figures OO won't show up with full percentages.
Posted by: sjon | January 24, 2006 09:05 PM