Blog

January 17th, 2012 by Gwynne Monahan

Digging into Survey: Evernote, OpenOffice and Other Desktop Apps

Despite the prevalence of cloud computing applications, there are still apps that reside on the desktop, though quite a few now sync with their cloud computing counterparts. Here’s the list from 2010:

• Billings (5.11%)
• Daylite (4.8%)
• iWork (18.89%)
• Lawstream (0.94%)
• Microsoft Office (37.06%)
• OpenOffice (5.95%)
• Parallels (11.27%)
• VMWare Fusion (7.31%)
• Other (8.66%)

The big winner was, predictably, Microsoft Office. It remains the word processor work horse of the legal profession. iWork ran a close second, Parallels squeaked by for third and all but Lawstream fighting for what’s left. Not too suprising.

Fast forward one year, to 2011:

• Billings (3.78%)
• Evernote (14.08%)
• Daylite (2.10%)
• iWork (14.92%)
• Lawstream (0.53%)
• Microsoft Office (37.61%)
• OpenOffice (7.04%)
• Parallels (9.03%)
• VMWare Fusion (4.94%)
• Other (5.99%)

Microsoft Office still dominates. Again, not surprising. What is surprising is that use of most of the others went down while OpenOffice use went up, and Evernote entered the picture.

Evernote has grown in popularity among lawyers, and though most of us think of it primarily as a web-based or cloud computing application, its desktop application clearly has made an impression. Jay Fleischman wrote a blog post on nine productivity tips for lawyers who use Evernote, Tom Mighell wrote using Evernote as part of research workflow and there is even an ebook out: Evernote for Lawyers: A Guide to Getting Organized & Increasing Productivity.

The increase in the use of OpenOffice is also notable. Open source applications grabbed some attention in 2011, even warranting a session at ABA TECHSHOW: The Open Source Law Firm. It remains to be seen if open source applications take root and expand in law practices in 2012.

Next week we’ll take a look at cloud-based application survey results.