Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Monday 27 October 2008, 3:40 PM
OpenOffice 3.0 - 5m downloads and counting
According to OpenOffice.org evangelist John McCreesh, the free office productivity suite has seen more than 5m downloads since it was made available two weeks ago.
A week ago, McCreesh blogged that the suite had been downloaded 3m times in its first week, with 80 percent of those downloads apparently being by Windows users. That's all been widely reported on by now, but there are three important caveats to bear in mind when looking at the figures and the resulting headlines.
Firstly, the OpenOffice.org website crashed when the new version got launched. It was down for about a day before users could access even the "bouncer" page that had been set up to redirect site requests to mirror sites. So, the first-week figure could have arguably been greater, had that downtime not occurred.
Secondly, until the new version there has been no record kept of OpenOffice downloads. Hence, any claims of the first-week stats being "record-breaking" could very well be true, but are impossible to stand up.
Thirdly, as McCreesh clearly says, the Linux download figures are almost certainly underrepresented, because most Linux users will have downloaded the update through their distro repository, not via the bouncer page. So, while tons of Windows versions have been downloaded - around 4.5m at the moment - it's unlikely that they represent 80 percent of the total.
All of that = why we didn't run these stats as a story proper. It's just impossible to write a verifiable hook for the piece. But the stats are nonetheless clearly very impressive, and the OpenOffice.org community deserves major kudos.
A week ago, McCreesh blogged that the suite had been downloaded 3m times in its first week, with 80 percent of those downloads apparently being by Windows users. That's all been widely reported on by now, but there are three important caveats to bear in mind when looking at the figures and the resulting headlines.
Firstly, the OpenOffice.org website crashed when the new version got launched. It was down for about a day before users could access even the "bouncer" page that had been set up to redirect site requests to mirror sites. So, the first-week figure could have arguably been greater, had that downtime not occurred.
Secondly, until the new version there has been no record kept of OpenOffice downloads. Hence, any claims of the first-week stats being "record-breaking" could very well be true, but are impossible to stand up.
Thirdly, as McCreesh clearly says, the Linux download figures are almost certainly underrepresented, because most Linux users will have downloaded the update through their distro repository, not via the bouncer page. So, while tons of Windows versions have been downloaded - around 4.5m at the moment - it's unlikely that they represent 80 percent of the total.
All of that = why we didn't run these stats as a story proper. It's just impossible to write a verifiable hook for the piece. But the stats are nonetheless clearly very impressive, and the OpenOffice.org community deserves major kudos.
PreviousComments on this post
They also deserve kudos for the quality of the product they have produced. After using 3.0 for a couple of weeks now, on both Windows and Linux, I would say that it is a significant improvement on 2.4, which was itself already very good.
jw 27/10/2008
ofcourse they do !
