Microsoft Office dominates. Period. Forrester reported in 2009 that 80% of companies ran some version of Office. Just 8% utilized Google Docs, and a mere 1% reported using Zoho Docs. In 2010 Gartner put Microsoft’s market share even higher, at 94%.
With so much hype around Google Docs and OpenOffice.org and the one or two other alternatives to Microsoft Office that you might have heard of, you might find those stats a little surprising. We did. We figured that all this competition would at least have made a DENT in Microsoft’s near-total market share by now. We get excited to see competitors challenging Microsoft’s position. Healthy competition benefits everyone.
Alas, it just hasn’t happened. Microsoft continues to release new versions of Office, including Office 365, its cloud-based alternative, and consumers continue to choose it over much cheaper (or even free) alternatives. Why haven’t Google Docs and Zoho made more of a splash in the office productivity software space?
Well, for one thing, businesses just don’t feel the need for an alternative to Microsoft; less than 20% reported that a desire to rely less on Office is driving their decision making. But nearly 70% report that improving productivity is the main influencing factor.
Productivity rules. The alternatives only fulfill a portion of the Office feature set that the average information worker really uses. I remember a handful of years ago how everyone thought that OpenOffice.org would revolutionize the productivity software space and undo Microsoft entirely… until somebody noticed that “copy and paste” didn’t work right in the free Open suite. That was kind of the end of that. Some people tried it, but as soon as they realized that it didn’t meet all of their needs, they dropped it like a hot potato. Oops.
Productivity rules. I don’t care HOW cheap it is, if it doesn’t work.
