Apple iWork is now the biggest challenger to MS Office!
News, Office Suites January 25th, 2006
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Apple iWork is now the biggest challenger to MS Office!
This news comes as a surprise considering most of the media sources points towards either the OpenOffice Suite or the Corel WordPerfect suite as the chief competitors to the domination of Microsoft’s MS Office suite. However, as per a survey conducted by market researcher NPD, Apple Computers have grabbed a 2.7 percent unit share in the US market for Office Suite applications.
This figure puts them ahead of Corel’s 1.6 percent. Microsoft is of course the dominating player in this market with a phenomenal market share of 95 percent. This statistic is even more important considering the fact that Apple does not make Apple iWork for the windows platform. Apple iWork is only available for the Macintosh platform which itself does not sell in large numbers when compared to regular PCs.
NPD analyst Chris Swenson said in a statement on this astonishing find: “Apple’s success for iWork has been pretty surprising.†Even more surprising is the fact that Microsoft does in fact make Mac version of their MS Office suite. In fact, they recently renewed their contract with Apple to continue making updated versions of MS Office suite for Mac for another couple of years.
However, MS Office continues to dominate the office suite market on even the Macintosh platform. As per the survey results, iWork accounted for 17.4 percent, compared to about 82 percent for Microsoft for the Macintosh based users.
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About
I’m not sure the headline is correct–any office suite made for such a small percentage of the market as Macs isn’t the biggest challenger to Microsoft Office. (I don’t deny that Macs are fabulous–I just don’t think they’re a huge presence marketshare-wise.)
But if that’s what Mac users want to use, that’s great. I like to see people have a choice in office suite, regardless of what the software is.
The article didn’t seem to mention OpenOffice.org market share. Given the number of people who now know about it, and the amount of new OpenOffice.org 2.0 classes I’m teaching, I’ve got to think it’s bigger than anything other than MS Office. Wikipedia says “Although Microsoft Office retains 95% of the general market, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice have secured 14% of the large enterprise market as of 2004 [10]. The OpenOffice.org web site reports almost 50 million downloads.” Toptechnews says “Sun’s StarOffice open-source offering has attained a 19 percent market share among small to midsize businesses.” A recent report on a lot of sites of business share sites OpenOffice.org’s share as 14.3%. None of these talk about just plain users but it’s an indication. Microsoft Office’s market share is definitely being chipped away at.