BANGALORE, INDIA: Its been a game of one-manship, that has not been able to reach its final round. Supporters of both MS Office and OpenOffice have been going around the town claiming that one is better than the other. And to add further to the debate, Germany based Webmasterpro.de, an IT service provider has come out with a list of international installation rankings for the open source office suite and some of its competitors, including Microsoft Office, Apples iWork and Corels WordPerfect.

And the results have been interesting. While in developed countries like the US, the UK OpenOffice has only 9 per cent market share; in Eastern European countries like Poland, Czech Republic and Germany, more than 21 per cent PCs are installed with OpenOffice. One of the reasons why Germany boasts of one of the highest adoption rates (21 per cent) could be attributed to the fact that OpenOffice originated from StarOffice developed in Germany. Similarly, Canada has the highest WordPerfect market share (4 per cent), which perfectly reflects the fact that it is developed by the Canadian software company, Corel.

Contrary to the expectations, all the hype around OpenOffice in India in the last few years hasn't yielded the desired results even though in the last few years the Election Commission too has gone ahead with the deployment of OpenOffice and free CDs have been distributed in southern states. The market share of OpenOffice in India is the second lowest in the world at a dismal 5 per cent, marginally ahead of China. Incidentally, adoption of MS Office in India is one of the highest in the world, 88 per cent (the other country being Netherlands).

The report further adds that around half of the OpenOffice users also have Microsoft Office installed, but notes that this may be due to expired trial versions of Office that came pre-installed on new Windows machines.

Sanjeev Kumar, CIO, Polygenta Technologies said that OpenOffice is seen as a substitute for cost cutting when IT budgets are cut. "Moreover, OpenOffice is not effective and organized with no structured organizational support and with companies (read Microsoft) coming out with pay-per-use plans, the option to switch to licensed software is high.

Another serious issue associated with OpenOffice is compatibility with other business applications. Ajay Meher, CIO, Sony Entertainment Network added, “ with 80 per cent users using Microsoft, compatibility issues crop up. For instance, if a document created in OpenOffice has to be read in MS Office, one has to first download and install plug-in which most users desist from doing.”

"In most office environments, the IT set-up is secured with these plug-ins and cannot be installed without administrative access resulting in people ignoring such documents," he noted

Kumar however doesn't forget to point out that in terms of quality and features, OpenOffice is one of the best when it comes to standalone machines.