The successful introduction of the open source office suite came despite by demand for the new software last week.
Only 221,000 downloads by Linux users were recorded, leading John McCreesh, head of marketing for OpenOffice.org, to suggest a massive undercount. McCreesh said 90% of Linux users traditionally receive OpenOffice.org updates straight from their Linux distribution's vendor, which would explain the relatively low Linux count.
Many non-English versions of OpenOffice.org are also distributed by alternate Web sites, and OpenOffice.org is still widely distributed via free CD-ROMs in magazines, said McCreesh.
With the undercount included, OpenOffice.org 3.0 may already be installed on up to 5 million computers worldwide, McCreesh .
OpenOffice.org's goal of winning 40% of the office software market by 2010 "doesn't seem as ambitious today as it did four years ago," said McCreesh.
Michael Croan, a senior marketing manager at , said, "Business customers can easily see that provides the productivity improvements they seek."
"Microsoft Office is well integrated, well supported and up-to-date with modern workforce requirements like collaboration, which is not always the case with open source alternatives. As a result, most customers will continue to seek the productivity improvements they can get from Office," Croan said.
Microsoft claims more than 550 million users of Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice.org's total usage, while unknown, . That is due to document compatibility fears and
OpenOffice.org 3.0 eases some adoption concerns. It is able to open all Office-formatted files, including the latest Office Open XML (OOXML) documents (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.), but it cannot save OOXML files natively.
OpenOffice.org is also likely counting on the to help its third try .
OpenOffice.org 3.0 also marks . Mac users accounted for 320,000 downloads of the new software in the first week.