Since OpenOffice.org 2.3 was released in September, downloads have skyrocketed to nearly a million per week and this number could continue its rise with Sun offering the free download to users receiving regular Java updates.

Sun is making it easy for Java users to download the full office suite by offering it on boot-up to individuals registered for Java auto-updates, reports Clive Akass with Personal Computer World, who also points out that OpenOffice.org is tantalizing because it is free and offers the ODF formats, which have been adopted as an international ISO standard.

Mark Herring, senior marketing director for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org and Network.com, identified some interesting statistics in relation to OpenOffice.org's download surge:

• 83% run Windows (Vista and XP)
• about 5% run Macintosh
• about 4% run Linux

• 21% of users are from the U.S.
• France and Germany each make up 12%
• Italy, UK, Japan and Canada each make up 4-5%

"For those die-hard skeptics out there still waiting for the majority to start using OpenOffice.org -- the time is right!" muses Herring. "With over 8 million daily unique visitors and 1M downloads occurring per week, the early majority is using the product -- come join us, the water is great!"

For a quick peek at the latest features in OpenOffice.org 2.3, take a look at a brief slideshow posted by eWEEK's Tiffany Maleshefski that covers exporting documents in MediaWiki format, the addition of 14 languages for nearly 130 total, improvements to Chart 3D features, animation editing of moving objects, exporting to HTML and additional sound effects.

Download OpenOffice.org 2.3. [...read more...]

From the latest issue:

Recent Blog Entries as of July 4, 2009, 11:31 am
'Managing ZFS File Systems in Solaris Containers' Demonstrating Out-of-the-box Performance Gains with memcached-1.3.1 The Father of Java on His Progeny's Future Patch Checked Advanced (PCA) - Solaris OS Patch Management Utility VirtualBox 3.0 Released	Doing a Mobile Install of OpenSolaris and VirtualBox on a Laptop Latest Support and Key Features of Solaris Cluster for SAP NetWeaver Stack Solaris News Bites White Paper: Getting Ahead of The Trend in the Mobility Market Intel Xeon 5500 Processor Series on OpenSolaris, Solaris, and Linux
Blog RSS Feed