Business and Finance

Kingsoft attacks Microsoft: free download of Chinese equivalent to Microsoft Office

word_ha_ha.jpg
Looks like Word, works like Word, but it's free!

Would you like a legal working equivalent to Microsoft Office for free?

For the next 90 days or so, you can download a Chinese-made alternative to Microsoft's Office suite, for free. The download is only 15MB, and includes equivalents to Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The company offering the free software is Kingsoft, whose more poetic Chinese name is Gold Mountain (金山). Kingsoft's Office suite is named WPS Office.


The software is available in versions for both Windows and Linux. According to King Soft, this new release of WPS Office "is an overhaul of 5 million lines of code by 100 engineers over three years", with all the work done in China. The software is available for free for 100 days, after which it will be sold at prices designed not to compete with Microsoft Office, but with pirate versions of Microsoft Office.

There seem to be two main problems with Kingsoft's office suite:

- The menus are only available in Chinese, and there is no English spell check;
- The interface design is a clone of Microsoft Office's interface.

Problems aside, this is the the beginning of a trend that is going to make people in Redmond and Mountain View nervous. Just as the West Coast is getting used to the competition from India, cut-rate Chinese software, hand-coded in Beijing and Hangzhou, is going to present another challenge.

Links and Sources
Media Partners
Visit these sites for the latest China news
090609guardian2.png 090609CNN3.png
China Media Timeline
Major media events over the last three decades
Danwei Model Workers
laomo2008fpA.jpg
Recommended blogs and new media
Books on China
AXL090619paulfrenchbook.jpg
Foreign journalists in China, from the Opium Wars to Mao : Paul French, author of a book on Carl Crow has written a book about the lives and exploits of foreign journalists reporting from China from the 1820s to 1949.
Earnshaw Books' Tales of Old Peking: Tales from Old Peking is available from Earnshaw Books, and like its sister, Tales from Old Shanghai is a book of fragments of information about periods, events or places in Beijing's history, collaging together pictures and text about eunuchs, concubines, the Lama Temple, Opium Wars, art, emperors, and a miscellany of other interesting topics
Henry F. Pringle's "Bridge House Survivor": Pringle was imprisoned by Japanese forces from October 1942 to August 1945, and Bridge House Survivor, available from Earnshaw Books, is his harrowing account of torture under the Japanese.
Front Page of the Day
A different newspaper every weekday
From the Vault
Classic Danwei posts
+ A short interview with Muzi Mei (2004.02): Danwei interviews Muzi Mei
+ CCTV vs. classic movies (2006.03): A rundown of several pastiches of Chinese movies appearing online as 大史记 - "The Year That Was". Some from CCTV, others not. With links to video.
+ Street hawker cries of Beijing (2006.12): Yang Changhe demonstrates hawker's cries in a video shot by Muzimei.
Danwei Archives
Danwei Feeds
Via Feedsky rsschiclet2.png (on the mainland)
or Feedburner rsschiclet.gif (blocked in China)
rsschiclet2.png rsschiclet.gif Main feed: Main posts (FB has top links)
rsschiclet2.png rsschiclet.gif Top Links: Links from the top bar
rsschiclet2.png rsschiclet.gif Danwei Jobs: Want ads
rsschiclet2.png rsschiclet.gif Danwei Digest: Updated daily, 19:30