It took Gus Tsao nearly nine years to raise enough money to launch his China-based technology startup, Evermore Software LLC.
Now the 59-year-old immigrant is poised for an even tougher mission: beating Microsoft Corp in the Chinese market for office software, and maybe taking a tiny bite out of the Redmond, Washington-based giant's dominance elsewhere.
"Everyone thinks I'm crazy to take on Microsoft, but China is not going to pay Microsoft forever with their prices," Tsao said.
Born in Chongqing, China, Tsao emigrated to the US in 1968 and became a US citizen in 1989. He founded Evermore in 1999 after his spreadsheet startup failed 11 years earlier.
He claims his Evermore Integrated Office, or EIOffice, is better than Microsoft Office when it comes to integrating the assorted word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications. EIOffice lets a user change, say, a sales figure in a spreadsheet and have it automatically changed in related reports.
Unlike Microsoft Office, in which different applications have separate user interfaces, Evermore puts all the components into a single application to create what it considers a more streamlined method of working.
On the surface, EIOffice looks a lot like Microsoft Office with its toolbars and drop-down menus. But a key difference is its slick navigation panel, which lets users easily maneuver between applications.
Still, the odds against Tsao's little-known company from Wuxi City, China, are high. Getting large enterprises to switch from Microsoft Office is an enormous task, given the major costs associated with a systemwide change.
Even established Microsoft Office rivals -- StarOffice from Sun Microsystems Inc, SmartSuite from IBM Corp, and WordPerfect Office from Corel Corp -- have managed to take only a sliver of the market for business desktop computers. Combined, Microsoft alternatives have less than 10 percent of the market, according to independent research firm Directions on Microsoft.
Evermore's software was launched last August in China, where Microsoft Office reigns, in both legal and pirated versions.
But the country of more than a billion people has a large untapped market.
Tsao is ready for a long journey.
"It'll take time, yes," he said. "In the meantime, we'll perfect our product."
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