Microsoft Office Still Rules With Readers

Everyone knows that Microsoft Office has a dominant position in office productivity. Despite facing several challenges, it is still the leading strategic choice of eWEEK Europe readers.

More than thirty percent of people who clicked on our current poll said that Microsoft Office is their strategic plan for office productivity – despite the fact that Microsoft tends to score poorly in online polls like this.

Cloud solutions still lag

eWEEK Europe’s readers seem to be in no hurry to move to the cloud – the top two solutions are packages installed on the desktop, with Microsoft in the lead with 32 percent, comfortably ahead of the biggest open source rival, OpenOffice, on 22 percent.

The result is a bigger-than-expected endorsement of Microsoft Office, given the fact that online polls usually deliver higher reults for open source solutions and other options away from the status quo.

Following Office and OpenOffice, comes the biggest cloud contender, Google Docs, and its corporate version Google Apps.

The strong showing for Google Apps will be encouraging for Google as it gears up for potential competition from the cloud version of Microsoft Office, which goes by the name of Office 365.

However, Microsoft can be equally proud of the fact that more than ten percent of the readers who voted are already planning to build their strategy on Office 365, even though it won’t be properly launched until later this month. The beta version has, however,  won positive reviews.

Few other packages seem to have caught people’s attention as yet – no one clamoured for a mention of LibreOffice – the Oracle-free fork of the OpenOffice open source project whose first version appears to have overtaken OpenOffice in many respects. Only four percent of readers said they used another package.

The “other” option, usually a repository of wit and wisdom, was disappointing this time. In the ten percent who picked that option, a surprising number apparently have based their office productivity strategy around our mother.

Next Poll: Is Your Storage Surging?

Next up, we want you to tell us if your storage needs are growing. We suspect that most of you have increasing needs for disk storage, but we’d like to know if this is true – and if so, just how quickly is your storage increasing?

This year, has your company’s storage increased? And if so has it more than doubled? We are also giving you the option to tell us your storage needs have decreased – though that strikes us as unlikely.

As always, let us know, and use the comments if you have something sensible or interesting to add to the debate.