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(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick

Tue, May 18th 2004 12:20am





Chinese Competitor Now Ready To Take On Microsoft Office

from the lots-of-competition dept

It was just a few years ago that the conventional wisdom was that Microsoft had won the OS war, won the browser war and (most convincingly of all) won the office productivity suite war. It looks like they're facing increasing competition on all of those fronts - but the most surprising may be the office productivity suite arena. Star Office/Open Office has gotten plenty of attention, but recently we saw IBM launch their own hosted suite but the biggest opportunities may be outside the US. Already, there are stories about China, Japan and Korea working on alternative operating systems and applications to get out from under the Microsoft thumb, and now Evermore is launching the latest version of their EI Office suite which is specifically targeted at the Chinese market. They offer versions of the software in Simplified Chinese, American English and Japanese. The one area where they might be causing themselves trouble is with the price. They offer two options: rentals at $99/year or $249 for 3 years - which isn't all that different from Microsoft's own pricing. If they really want to cause trouble, they should under price Microsoft.

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    Price may be OK

    identicon
    DV Henkel-Wallace, May 18th, 2004 @ 9:53am

    They offer two options: rentals at $99/year or $249 for 3 years - which isn't all that different from Microsoft's own pricing. If they really want to cause trouble, they should under price Microsoft.
    If MS Office in Chinese is terrible, or if they think they'll have a lot of nationalistic customers, then charging the same as MS is a good idea. It's only if MS is broadly acceptable to these guys' customers that they need to underprice.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: Price may be OK

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, May 18th, 2004 @ 12:01pm


    Isn't China the land of software piracy ?
    Pricing doesn't seem quite so important all of a sudden.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Re: Price may be OK

    identicon
    Rich Tong, May 18th, 2004 @ 11:47pm

    Well, it probably will depend on features like Office compatibility. Something that folks competing with established players forget. I've used StarOffice and compatibility is OK.

    I sometimes wonder what would happen if there was a true compatible and it had a few features and low cost distribution and pricing.

    Of course Microsoft handles this with very aggressive OEM bundles and country specific pricing to prevent a stealth play in China from winning

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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