世論 What Japan Thinks

I’ve looked before at which Office suite Japanese people use, so the basic figures below will perhaps not be so new to my readers, but perhaps there is some new information that can be gleaned from this recent survey reported by japan.internet.com and conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc on the matter of desktop applications in the corporate environment.

Demographics

On the 25th of September 2007 331 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel employed in the public or private sector completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 84.9% of the sample was male, 11.8% in their twenties, 34.7% in theor thirties, 39.3% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.

Of the product categories listed in Q1, I use Microsoft-only for all categories bar the very occasional FileMaker database and I use Notepad2 for my text-based editing needs.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or check out my weekly newsletter. Thanks for visiting!

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com reported on another small but interesting survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the use of office suites. this survey is timely with Nihon University recently announcing that from April 1st this year they would be using Google Apps, and Ashisuto have announced they are moving from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.

Demographics

On the 17th of May 2007, 330 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s online monitor pool completed an internet-based private survey. All were employed in public or private industry, 73.6% were male, 13.3% in their twenties, 40.3% in their thirties, 34.2% in their forties, 9.7% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.

This result is not particularly surprising, given that other surveys have shown a virtual monopoly by Microsoft in the workplace for browsers and operating systems.

I personally haven’t used either OpenOffice.org or Google Apps, and work has corporate licences for Microsoft Office, and given the rather heavy reliance on PowerPoint (if I were in management here, I’d ban it) in particular, I cannot see any prospect of change. Interestingly, perhaps, a couple of months ago we gathered together money-saving tips, but no-one suggested using open source office applications to save on licensing. However, given that all other departments would be using Office, without 100% compatability we couldn’t change. In addition, many macro-filled Excel spreadsheets are used within the company, so I suspect they would not be usable in other spreadsheet tools.
Read the rest of this entry »