BEIJING, May 18 (Xinhuanet) -- Evermore, an increasingly-known-to-industry Chinese software company successfully attracted people from the media, government and the IT field Monday in Beijing by launching 3 versions of its product -EI Office 2004 at the same time, its la test step forward towards its Mission Impossible of challenging and defeating Microsoft in Office software.

    According to professionals, Evermore software Inc, a 240-strong Chinese enterprise, has set a precedent for the Chinese IT companies when it launched the latest Evermore Integrated Office 2004 in three languages of Simplified Chinese, American English and Japanese. The press conference room in Beijing's five-star New Century Hotel was crowded with IT experts, Chinese government officials and reporters who are excited to see the latest development of what some people call "the first real Office in the world".

    Before the demonstration of the software, Evermore's founder and General Manager Gus Tsao made a brief introduction of his EI Office 2004, putting emphasis on the advantages and features that EI office take over MS Office and other pieces of Office software. Tsao has been actually familiar to media and the industry since he bravely stood up years ago, claiming he could defeat Microsoft finally, breaking the rule for startups of not going head-to-head with the IT giant and then was considered crazy by almost all the people,

    Tsao was quoted as saying that Evermore has been concentrating all of its resources on the development and improvement of EI Office and is determined to produce the best Office software. He acknowledged that compared with Microsoft, Evermore is weaker in terms of capitals, manpower and some technologies, but Tsao also claimed, "There are many well-known battles where the weak and outnumbered won the war."

    It proves in a very short period of 3 years that Evermore has done much better in integration with all of its functions like word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation modules within a single application so that changes to one document are reflected in other related files. Besides, EI Office 2004 imports and exports Microsoft Office Excels, Word documents and PPT files, including graphics, slides, charts and tables. Customers can save documents in PDF, RTF and TXT formats.

    Earlier in February this year, Tsao's Evermore presented its challenger to Microsoft Office at DEMO 2004 held in Arizona, United States as the only business ever invited from China including HKSR and Taiwan province since 1989 when DEMO started. Evermore's EI Office 2004, built in Java and running on all three platforms, monopolized conversation about "disruption" of MS Office in the marketplace at the conference.

    According to a DEMO survey, at least 40 percent of conference participants said they believed Microsoft could lose its dominant position in office productivity. In today's officially launched EI Office 2004, a Science Editor for creating equations and working with scientific symbols and graphics is also included, indicating Evermore is pursing its another notion of innovation.

    Price is also an advantage for EI Office since American users can lease EI Office for US$99 annually or $249 for three years. And the lease includes all version upgrades and free technical support during the valid lease period.

    Back in the United States where Microsoft is based, Gus Taso and his legend Evermore attracted the attention of some famous media, including the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times and Business Week, which widely reported Evermore's booming and Tsao's dream to defeat Microsoft. Even Microsoft itself began to look into this younger brother more seriously when its senior VP wrote to Tsao and said "feichanghao" for EI Office.

(China Daily)