Microsoft Office

The ClickStream report suggests that a mere 1% of U.S. adult Internet users used Google Docs, while Microsoft Office is in use by more than 50% of adult U.S. Internet users.

On Friday, ClickStream Technologies published a study claiming that “use of free productivity applications such as Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Docs and OpenOffice remains low, while Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Office is in use by over 50% of adult U.S. internet users and shows no signs of declining popularity.”
The 5-year-old technology metrics company reported that a mere 1% of U.S. adult Internet users used Google Docs, based on its study of 2,400 U.S. adult Internet users who agreed to install the company’s data-collection software.

However, the study has come into question this week because two former Microsoft employees are involved in the company that fielded the study.
In 2006, Google published a report claiming that the risk of click fraud is overstated by click-fraud auditing companies. Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s business product manager for trust and safety, posted at length about problems with click-fraud statistics from such companies.

On Sunday, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web spam team, took issue with ClickStream’s findings in a blog post. He suggested that the sample size is low, that the tech-savvy, affluent sort who use Google Docs are probably underrepresented in the ClickStream study because they “are probably less likely to agree to click-monitoring in exchange for cash and prizes,” and that the high proportion of female respondents (more than 65%) doesn’t agree with the overall percentage of female Internet users (52%) and thus suggests sampling errors.

Cutts said that Compete estimated that Google Docs received 4.4 million visitors in September, which he said is slightly less than 2.4% of the U.S. online population.

In a comment on Cutts’ blog, Roy Schestowitz, a doctoral candidate in medical biophysics at Manchester University, free software advocate, and co-editor of BoycottNovell.com, linked to a post on his site that offered an additional explanation for the findings: Two of ClickStream’s employees, CEO and co-founder Cameron Turner and senior research analyst Kim Anderson, used to work at Microsoft.