Stefan Mileschin

It looks like hopes that open sauce, or cloud based alternatives might kill off Microsoft Office were completely unfounded.

Beancounters at Forrester have been adding up the numbers and dividing by their shoe size and come up with a report which claims that Vole Office is the most preferred productivity suite by a huge margin.

It conducted a survey with 155 clients about productivity suites which were used in their offices. Vole Office is the most used productivity software among the companies, with Office 2010 used by nearly 85 per cent of the companies, while Office 2013 being adopted gradually as Windows 8 is rolled out.

Vole wants to make sure that Office works on every platform including the cloud to combat any attempts by Google to muscle in on its market.

Microsoft recently launched Office for Android and iPhone, for Office 365 subscribers. This might not be necessary. The report the majority of IT decision makers don't consider multi-platform support a priority and are satisfied with Office on Windows at work.

The report is bad news for open-source suites such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice which started off so well. However, they failed to gain market share after initial eagerness from companies to adopt those softwares. In 2011 the software packages had 11 per cent of the market, and now just have four per cent.

Google Docs has significantly lower usage compared to Microsoft Office and many users are planning to move to Office 365. This is more or less what Microsoft has been trying to tell the world since September, but few believed it.

Office 365 has been doing well with the Home Premium version recently crossing two million subscribers and a $1.5 billion annual run-rate.

What the figures confirm is that Microsoft is still the king of Office software and nothing has managed to shift it.

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