When it comes to Google Docs, there are no good numbers

No matter which set of numbers you believe, Google Docs has a lot of market share ground to gain, not only against Microsoft Office but also OpenOffice.org's free office suite. Google's Matt Cutts takes issue with a recent study by ClickStream Technologies, which found that Google Docs was used by just 1% of Internet users, vs. 5% using OpenOffice and 51% using Microsoft Office. Cutts did some research on his own and found Google Docs with 5%, Open Office with 12.4% and Microsoft Word with 49.6% share. But either way you slice it, Google Docs isn't really a big factor in terms of office productivity suites--at least yet.

Cutts' main beef is with ClickStream's sample, and especially the weird finding that even more people use Corel's WordPerfect (3%) than Google Docs (1%), which is hard to believe. ClickStream's numbers were based on surveys completed by 2,400 Internet users over the age of 18, who agreed to participate and install ClickSite (a tool that records click-level user behavior data across all browsers and applications) in exchange for a chance to win cash and prizes. The sample was self-reported as 64.5% female and 34.5% male. Cutts says he's skeptical for a few reasons:

- 2,400 users is not a ton of people.

- Tech-savvy, more affluent users are probably less likely to agree to click-monitoring in exchange for cash and prizes. I would go so far as to say most tech-savvy users would actively avoid such offers. If Google Docs users really do skew more toward affluent/tech-savvy (and I think that they do), that would result in fewer Google Docs users in ClickStream’s consumer panel.

- 65.5% female users sounds way too high. I think a more representative number is something like 52% of the online population. If ClickStream is getting 65%+ female users and not even in the 50% range, there could be all kinds of sampling errors in the data, e.g. if users were recruited from sites that didn’t represent the overall internet population.

Cutts aimed to correct these problems using stats from Wakoopa, but while he gets more believable numbers for WordPerfect (0.3% vs. Docs' 5%), the overall picture isn't all that healthy for Docs. It still lags both Word (49.6% share) and OpenOffice (12.4% share) by quite a bit.

The upshot is that both data collection techniques are questionable (hardly everyone uses Wakoopa, and few participate in contest/surveys that track their online behavior). In the end, perhaps Phil Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped is right:

Having no stats at all would often be better than having skewed stats like Alexa or Clickstream, because then at least people would realize they don’t have any good numbers, instead of believing in the wrong numbers. But I guess there will always be these kind of services for people buying into wrong but authoritative-looking numbers: http://www.esolutionsdata.com/statistic/8153

So true.

• Microsoft
• Software
• Google
• Google Docs
• Internet users
• market share
• Microsoft Office
• OpenOffice.org
• Word
• WordPerfect