TmaxSoft ready to take on Microsoft

In 1999, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson stated in his 207-page ruling that Microsoft had improperly abused its power to the detriment of competitors and consumers.

After 10 years, Microsoft`s Windows Operating System continues to make billions of dollars every year, controlling 88 percent of the global market.

Computer users now take Microsoft`s monopoly for granted, as most of them regard the Windows operating system as part of the computers they use, rather than as a separately purchasable product. That tendency is even more evident in Korea, where the company enjoys about 99 percent of the market share.



Under the circumstances, the news that the Seoul-based software company TmaxSoft is going to produce its own operating system to compete with the global superpower must have been hard to believe for most people, despite the fact that the company has been the leader in the local middleware market since 2003. Its product -- Java Enterprise User Solution, "JEUS" in short -- took a larger market share than Oracle`s WebLogic and IBM`s WebSphere.

"We are trying to do what Microsoft has done over the past 30 years, starting with DOS, in less than five years," Mun Jin-il, president & CEO of TmaxSoft said in an interview with The Korea Herald on Monday.

"Some argue that the development plan must be a scam to attract media attention, but I think now more people believe that we have good enough technology to compete with Microsoft through our operating system after last week`s event," he said.

Last Tuesday, the company unveiled a testing version of its operating system tentatively called "Tmax Windows" at Grand InterContinental Seoul hotel located right across from the company. While the event has proved that the idea of Korean operating system is not a scam, but many of over 10,000 participants complained that a brief exposure to the product was far from being enough to tell the uniqueness and competitiveness of the system.

"Some compare me with the once admired professor who disgraced himself with the use of falsified data," Mun said, referring to stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk. Hwang was once feted as a national hero but his reputation is in tatters after he was found to have faked two landmark pieces of research into cloning human stem cells.

"One huge difference is that we have done all this on our own, without receiving financial aid from the government," he said. Mun, who took over the CEO position in December, added: "l can tell you, though, that the new operation system will be far cheaper than MS Windows yet have features that MS Windows doesn`t have."

At this point, the most dominant question will be: How much developing the new OS will mean to the company? And the answer is "a lot."

"JEUS alone generates annual profit of 30 billion won ($23.2 million). We could have taken an easy stroll following the path we have taken so far," Mun added. The company is also well-known as a leading financial solution provider, and its products are widely used by major Korean financial services firms.

He said that a company should have firm presences in three business fields -- middleware, database systems and operating systems -- to grow into a global software company.

"Up until now only Microsoft and IBM are have all these. And we will join them with Tmax Windows," he said.

Based on the success of the new system, the company will further will contribute much to the renaissance of the Korean software industry, he said. "Koreans are born to be successful in the software business: highly educated, smart, good at criticizing others and always in a hurry," he smiled.

Scheduled to launch in November, the new operation system will be sold first to corporate customers including stat-owned organizations. It will be available for individual customers from sometime next year, the company said.

(danlee@heraldm.com)









By Lee Yong-sung