Compete found that visitors to Google Docs and Spreadsheets apps are only spending about 5 minutes per month on the site, and only visiting about 3 days out of each month. One would expect that average time per user would be fairly high for a word processing application - after all, college students spend hours in front of Microsoft Word typing up papers each week. 58% of unique visitors to Google Docs and Spreadsheets in September 2008 never actually touched the applications themselves.Įven more disappointing for Google, according to Compete the time spent on site is miserable. Though Compete reports that the combined number of users for Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets is 4.4 million - peanuts compared to Microsoft’s Office install base and Google’s total traffic, but still a healthy number - more than half of those visitors don’t get past the landing page. New numbers from Compete suggest that things are even worse than they appear for Google’s hopes of competing with Microsoft in the office. The free, desktop Microsoft Office competitor may have almost 4 times as many users as Google’s suite of web-based tools. Despite a lot of attention paid among the early adopter press (read: web 2.0 tracking blogs like this one), not many people actually use Google Docs. A few weeks ago on this blog we talked about why Microsoft might not need to fear Google Docs quite yet.

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