21 percent of German PCs running OpenOffice?

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 application 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.