Application usage summary: 4/18/08

In the first of our ongoing series on “who’s using what” under Windows, we focus on the state of the Task List on our cross-section of instrumented systems:

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Based on our sampling of ~1500 Windows systems, here’s what we found:

• Over 80% of you fire-up Internet Explorer from time to time. Whether it’s to check an IE-specific web site or because you’re using an application that incorporates some IE functionality, Microsoft’s web browser shows up as one of the most common processes in the real world.

• Despite IE’s near omnipresence we still find Firefox running on nearly half (47%) of the systems sampled. This would seem to bolster our above theory about ancillary IE use: Chances are, if you’re running Firefox, it’s because you chose to do so and simply prefer it to IE. Within our small community, at least, Firefox is sporting “market” share that’s better than half of IE’s on the same sample group.

• Nearly all of you run Microsoft Office. We found no sign of OpenOffice or other alternatives. By far the major player was Microsoft Word (60%), with Excel (44%) and PowerPoint (21%) making a respectable showing. And, of course, Outlook was the dominant mail client at 50% of instrumented systems.

• Another frequent visitor: Adobe Acrobat Reader (36%). This comes as no surprise as Adobe long ago locked-up the portable document format marketplace. So much for XPS and the so-called “threat” from Microsoft.

• Also not surprising: A big swath (35%) of you own iPods (or iPhones). It’s like a sea of white headphones! That’s just scary!

That’s all for this week. Next up: Operating System usage statistics. Stay tuned!