But in fact, this agreement just make it easier for Chinese consumers to switch. In 1996, Kingsoft signed a deal with Microsoft to create Word and WPS interoperability. In the meantime, Microsoft invested its energy in a Word feature set that surpassed WPS’ offerings. ![]() ![]() Realizing that Chinese users would soon be shifting from DOS to Windows, Kingsoft made a big bet on a new product called Pangu, putting all their R&D into an office management software that took three years to develop and only sold 6,000 copies. Yet, as Windows 3.0 hit the market, Kingsoft saw the writing on the wall. This DOS-based software by 1993 had 95% of China’s market share. In 1988, Qiu Bojun spent over a year in seclusion, writing 1.25 million lines of code to singlehandedly create the first Chinese language word processor. “There is a company that fully deserves to be known as the Whampoa Military Academy of the Chinese programmer,” she writes, referring to the legendary academy that trained the first commanders of the Red Army. Sister Dan Dan writes in an article on “The hidden history of WPS’s years on the market,” that Kingsoft: “because of WPS, they forced Microsoft to really fight not only for China but also the global market of office products.” Kingsoft’s early missteps in its fight with Microsoft are one of the great what-ifs in Chinese tech history, and its rebound is nothing short of remarkable. ![]() Westerners-and even many Chinese familiar with its products-regard it as simply another knockoff Chinese firm whose WPS Office is little more than an off-brand Microsoft Office suite.īut an anonymous Chinese blogger tells us why Kingsoft’s story matters. It raised $640 million and currently trades at a $10 billion valuation. In late November, 30 years after its founding, Kingsoft’s software business hit the Shanghai STAR market (a NASDAQ spinoff).
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