Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

Gray Knowlton ??? More than 100 Million OpenXML Compatibility Pack downloads - Notes2Self.net

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:56:32 GMT

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re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

David St — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:09:07 GMT

Kind of makes you wonder what all the fuss is about doesn't it? Where are the ODF supporters now? Why aren't they commenting on this post?

http://blogs.technet.com/tasush/archive/2009/06/24/100-open-xml.aspx

TrackBack — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:53:40 GMT

http://news.softpedia.com/news/open-xml-compatibility-pack-over-100-million-downloads-115027.shtml

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re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

Gray Knowlton — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:51:45 GMT

Luc, can you please re-post your comment? It is not in my mod queue for approval..

re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

Gray Knowlton — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:15:43 GMT

Luc was having trouble with my mod q, so I'm going to post the comment he emailed to me today:

@Gray: Congratulation for this extraordinary achievement.

@David: "Where are the ODF supporters now? Why aren't they commenting on this post?" Maybe because they are busy downloading, installing and using OpenOffice.org.

The compatibility pack for Open XML was released in November of 2006. It achieved 20 million downloads in December of 2007 (i.e. after 13 months), and 100 million downloads in June of 2009 (i.e. after 31 months). Given the installed base of MS Office, I'm not impressed by these figures.

OpenOffice has a much smaller installed base, but it is rapidly growing... OpenOffice 3.0 was released on 13-Oct-2008. Based on a similarly conservative counter as for the OOXML compatibility pack, it achieved 1 million of downloads in 2 days (http://www.mealldubh.org/index.php/2008/10/15/first-million), 10 millions in 2 months (http://www.mealldubh.org/index.php/2008/11/10/the-first-ten-million) and 60 millions in 7 months (http://marketing.openoffice.org/marketing_bouncer.html).

OpenOffice 3.1 was launched on 7-May-09, and is currently above 11.7 million of downloads, in one and a half month.

And don't forget that OpenOffice is only one of the many products supporting ODF. In particular, Microsoft is now also an ODF supporter and each download of MS Office 2007 SP2 results in another PC(s) able to produce ODF files.

re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

Luc Bollen — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:11:52 GMT

Gray, you give figures about the increase in the number of OOXML and ODF documents indexed by Google.

Based on your figures, the global growth rate of OOXML (from 144,800 files to 478,100 files, i.e. an increase of 230%) is around 3 times higher than the growth rate of ODF files (from 124,200 files to 207,700 files, i.e. an increase of 67%).

Given that in Oct-08 there were roughly the same number of ODF and OOXML files, my conclusion is that the number of OOXML active users is only 3 times higher than the number of active ODF users. Does that match your conclusion ?

re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

Gray Knowlton — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:33:10 GMT

Luc, you might try to spin this as good news for ODF, but remember that ODF (and ODF implementations) had a full 12-month head start. the way to interpret this data is that the rate of Open XML usage is accelerating at a fairly dramatic pace, and we will likely have passed 1M indexed DOCX documents within the claendar year. ODT will take a very, very long time to get there.

If you recall back to Rob's post a few years ago, when he cited x thousand ODF documents and around 400 Open XML files, we're at a situation where Open XML traction has caught, surpassed and now greatly exceeded ODF. this gap will only increase over time.

But i'll make you a deal. let's wait 6 months and see where the numbers stand.. we'll come back to this then.

re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

southwest — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:47:04 GMT

That sounds like good news all round. Great that 100 million extra people have OOXML acces, still a lot more to go as Luc suggests.

Congratulations also to OpenOffice for the success.

Microsoft is clearly helping with ODF adoption through Office SP2 and the Cleverage plugin.

It seems only fair that OpenOffice will return the favour of standards support instead of providing read-only support, that would be some real progress.

re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

Luc Bollen — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:29:19 GMT

Gray, of course the good news for ODF would be that its growth rate is higher than the growth rate of OOXML ;-). Now isn't calling this a 'dramatic pace' not a spin ? But as you say, the interesting point will be to see what is the trend within 6 months.

re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

Luc Bollen — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:43:56 GMT

@Southwest: "It seems only fair that OpenOffice will return the favour of standards support instead of providing read-only support"

That's one of the issues of having two standards instead of one: you need to distract a lot of your resources to support the second standard. For Microsoft, it is quite easy to provide resources for implementing ODF, but it is much more difficult for OpenOffice to find the resources for implementing the 6000+ pages of OOXML... Maybe Microsoft could provide to OpenOffice the resources needed to implement and support the export filter ?

re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

Gray Knowlton — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:51:14 GMT

Hi Luc,

In fact we have done exactly that, in a number of ways. The Sourceforge projects for Open XML and ODF translation, the binary to Open XML translators, the DII events, the Implementer's notes for Open XML and ODF are available for OpenOffice.org (and everybody else) to review.

Besides, OpenOffice.org and many other non Microsoft Office products do a fine job of supporting the Office binaries, so I'm not sure that I agree with your perspective. Business productivity apps are complex and require multiple doucment formats. Good ones support many of them.

re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

Carl — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:40:57 GMT

very informative post on open XML. Thank you very much. keep it up

re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

Samantha — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 13:50:11 GMT

very informative. please keep it going

re: Compatibility Pack for Open XML passes 100 million downloads

Kevin — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:34:46 GMT

great info in both the post and the comments. thank you all