http://www.theinquirer.net

An study by the German web analytics firm Webmasterpro.de claims that a huge 21 per cent of German PCs run the Openoffice.org suite or other open source office productivity applications.

Apparently the company tapped in to a huge sample of over one million German Internet users and its magic Flash Counter Statistics Service spat out the following numbers. The largest group, 72 per cent of users stuck with Microsoft Office, 21.5 per cent chose a variant of Openoffice.org (including Sun’s Staroffice, IBM’s Lotus Symphony and other derivatives), 2.7 per cent preferred Corel’s WordPerfect Office, 1.4 per cent used Apple’s Iwork, 0.3 per cent selected Softmaker Office and 0.03 per cent chose Koffice, while 17.1 per cent didn’t have any office applications suite installed at all.

The method used in the survey was a pretty nifty idea. The counter checked which fonts were installed on each user’s PC, from which it could then identify the types of office suites being used.

We know that the Germans have a healthy respect for IT. They have a one of the best and most versatile IT publishing markets on the planet but 21 per cent is a staggering statistic.

A quick check of Wiki stats only found references to other European counties deploying Openoffice.org for public sector and small business workloads. If you have any information that suggests this statistic is in error for German Internet users, or actually appears to be correct, we’d love to know. µ