Japanese engineers overwhelmingly use Microsoft Office, most two versions behind
If one hangs out at places like slashdot for too long one gets the impression that almost all the software engineers usually use free office suites such as OpenOffice.org, and only resort to Microsoft Word and friends under threats of physical violence from pointy-haired bosses. However, that is the USA; what about Japan and the average engineer? To find out, japan.internet.com reported on a survey recently conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into office suite software.
Demographics
On the 18th of August 2007 330 IT engineers involved in software development, system development and system management completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 96.4% of the sample was male, 1.2% in their twenties, 26.7% in their thirties, 59.1% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties and 0.3% in their sixties. This sample seems to have a definite case of “metabo” (”metabolic syndrome”, or more simply a lot of fat around the middle!); JR Tokai Express does have a middle management bias, but only 1.2% in their twenties seems extremely low.
Back in May I translated another similar survey on office suite usage in the public and private sectors, where we saw 97.1% used Microsoft Office, a very similar figure to the one reported below when looking at just the IT engineering segment, a perhaps counter-intuitive result.
Research results
Q1: Do you use Microsoft Office or other office suite at your place of work? (Sample size=330)
Yes (to SQ1) 99.4% No 0.3% Don’t know 0.3% Q1SQ1: Which office suite do you mainly use at your place of work? (Sample size=328)
Microsoft Office (to SQ2) 97.9% Star Office 1.2% JUST Suite 0.6% OpenOffice.org 0.0% Google Apps 0.0% Kingsoft Office 0.0% Other 0.3% Don’t know 0.0% Q1SQ2: Which version of Microsoft Office do you use at your place of work? (Sample size=321)
Office 1.5 (Word 5.0, etc) 0.0% Office 4.3 (Word 6.0, etc) 0.0% Office 95 (Word 95, etc) 0.0% Office 97 (Word 97, etc) 0.6% Office 2000 (Word 2000, etc) 27.4% Office XP (Word XP, etc) 26.5% Office System 2003 Editions (Word 2003, etc) 40.5% Office System 2007 Editions (Word 2007, etc) 4.7% Don’t know 0.3% Other 0.0% Q1SQ4: Does your place of work have plans to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Office? (Sample size=295, those not running the latest version)
Yes 16.5% No 43.6% Don’t know 31.8%
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Simon Thorpe said,
September 11, 2007 @ 16:17
Have you seen banks and post offices in Japan, or government offices like any kencho or city office? They all use really old versions of Office, typically on those beige-colored machines that are now yellowing around the edges. I’ve seen Office circa ‘98 still widely used in many public offices. My questions as to why they haven’t updated their OS, or are aware of more modern software produces only blank faces. Most Japanese office workers were not aware of XP and XP software.
Not quite sure why this is so. Maybe it’s a case of being comfortable with what one is using; “if it’s not broken, why fix it”? If so, then fair enough.
A colleague of mine brought his (XP) laptop to the office one day, much to the utter amazement of the entire staff. They were even more dumb-founded when he link the office’s client list to a label printer and proceeded to print out hundreds of address labels. This relieved the burden of four office ladies who would otherwise have spent four days writing them out by hand. He was treated like a film star!
Yet all it required was a few mouse clicks and a little know-how… something that any technically-challenged office worker in Japan wouldn’t be aware of.
I used to work in an Japanese office where two office girls would spend three days using those library book stampers (those one’s that produce that lovely distinctive double-click sound) on documents. Again.., if it works, why change it?
Ken Y-N said,
September 11, 2007 @ 23:03
Simon, thanks for the comment!
Even at my workplace with a bunch of technical engineers, the lack of common-sense usage of tools is quite amazing. A few months ago I was shown how to build an app from a Linux (actually CygWin) command line, and much to my amazement there was no script, you had to type at least three rather long cp and mv commands, let alone any use of time & date stamps to speed up the process.
Garrett said,
September 12, 2007 @ 02:19
Those percentages do seem really weird. More than ten times as many IT guys in their fifties as in their twenties? Could explain why so many didn’t know what they were using. (By “so many,” I mean that it shocks me that any IT engineer would not know what software his office was using.)
I had an eye-opener a couple of months ago. In the final class with a group of freshman and sophomore guys (all between 18 and 20), I showed them how to make a blog on WordPress. I was shocked that all of them thought it was impossible for a normal person to do (I am by no means particularly techincally savvy. I will admit to shaking my mouse when my computer freezes.) I was even more shocked that they were all amazed that I was able to directly enter the url for Google, that not one of them knew how to enter a url (which may explain why, as you showed in an earlier translated survey, why Yahoo and Google were top search queries), and that only one out of four was able to check his own e-mail without starting at the university portal.
I am still in something of a state of shock that young men at one of Japan’s finest universities - young men who have to routinely turn in assignments over the Internet - were less competent in their Internet usage than my 82-year-old grandmother.
Not one, in a group of four 18 to 20 year olds, was capable of using a search engine or typing in a url. All they could do was click on things from the university portal and use Word.
Before and since, I’ve seen similar shocking incompetence from people of all ages, but it seems particularly bad among university students, who ought to be the best.
For all its success in hardware, Japan just doesn’t seem up to par in application. As Alex Kerr put it (I’m paraphrasing): Japanese companies make the world’s greatest hardware, then Japan uses it to produce children’s games.
Charles Jannuzi said,
June 8, 2008 @ 14:45
Most people in Japan do not use computers everyday–certainly not for private use. They might use them everyday if the job requires it. So everyone goes to the default position–they use the software installed on their computers. Universities here have big MS and Apple/Mac (non-science types) biases. American companies should be happy that Japan is such a complacent software market for them. Open Office is a free suite and hardly anyone bothers to download it. And Ichitaro–take any version back to 1995–is simply the best Japanese language word processor available, and yet when they turn on their machines, Japanese use bloated crapware like MS Office.