Dan Gillmor writes about a Chinese software company seeking to break into the Office software company:
Tsao is chief executive of Evermore Software, a Chinese company that sees an opening for a new kind of Office, or at least what he calls a truly advanced kind. And at the Demo conference that starts today in suburban Phoenix, he’ll show off the English version of “Evermore Integrated Office” (EIOffice), the newest edition of a product that has been in development since 1999.
What he demonstrated struck me as more advanced in some ways than the Microsoft product. EIOffice 2004 puts a word processor, presentation package and spreadsheet into a single application, not a collection of programs. The integration is smooth and deep, and there’s a natural feel to the way it all works together. Overall, the product looks slick and capable of handling serious chores.
Evermore’s pricing, moreover, tries to reflect real-world reality. Tsao says EIOffice will be sold with an annual license fee of $99 in the United States, with volume discounts available. And it will cost considerably less where the median incomes are lower. He called it a GDP approach to pricing. (The single-user U.S. price sounds high to me, but businesses will get better deals.)
EIOffice is written in Java, and also runs on Linux. I am not sure it will be able to compete against MS Office on one side and OpenOffice on the other.
