I write about software and web applications at my blog, Matt's Cuppa, and I've recently introduced a polling system to the blog. My last poll closed today and I found the results rather interesting.

The question that I asked was, "I prefer to use which word processing application?" The available responses were:

• Microsoft Word - a commercial application.
• OpenOffice.org Writer - an open source application.
• Google Docs - a web-based application
• Other - Users could write in their own choice.

Here are my initial thoughts from the results:

• No one wrote in their own application. Do the above three applications have such a dominance over the user base that others such as Zoho Office, Thinkfree Office, and Abiword have no significant following in comparison?
• Microsoft Word and OpenIffice.org received an equal number of votes. To me, this points to a growing trust in the ability (and compatibility) of open source applications. Are we finally getting over the "If it's free, it must not be very good" mentality? It could also be that people are beginning to tire of the constant upgrades and purchases required to have the latest Microsoft Office products?
• Google Docs recieved the fewest votes of the three. My speculation here is threefold. First, most users are still most comfortable (and have been trained to feel thus) using software that is installed on their machine. Second,  many people have a distrust of putting their information out on the internet. Outages, viruses, and identity theft have all contributed to this distrust. And, third, current web-based applications are not as reliable and often require specific updates or plugins to funciton properly.

While the poll results show a trend towards open source, which I believe is very good, the adoption of web-based applications was not as deep as I anticipated. Also, I did not incluse hybrid applications such as Thinkfree Office, which I will cover more indepth in my next post.