OStatic

What would you say if you heard that OpenOffice.org had an impressive 22% share of the market? It does, in Poland and the Czech Republic. At least according to numbers pulled together by Webmaster.de using FlashCounter. The analysis looked at visitors from more than 20 countries and found use of OpenOffice.org is highest in Europe and not even in double digits in the United States.

The results may not be entirely accurate, but at least they provide a picture of office suite usage. The method used was to examine fonts installed on systems to identify various office suites. The OpenOffice.org numbers roll up all variants of OpenOffice.org ? IBM Lotus Symphony, StarOffice, NeoOffice, etc.

When Microsoft announced it was planning to offer lightweight, web-based versions of some of its Office components, there was some speculation that maybe it could be used with alternate browsers. It seemed Firefox would be a likely candidate beyond IE, and some ventured to wonder about Safari.

Even if Firefox was supported, it didn't seem likely this suite would be specifically web based, so it would need Windows, right? According to a few sources it seems as if that might not be the case. Though the source is a Microsoft Community member blog (and not a pronouncement from corporate sources) the concept of this service on Mac and Linux is fascinating because it suggests so much about what Microsoft might be thinking.