Page 166 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

Chen started out by earning a mechanical engineering degree in 1998
from Beijing Institute of Technology. His first job was as an engineer at the
Chinese firm HanWang Corp., where he spent two years designing software
that could recognize handwriting electronically for digital input. Chen got his
first peek outside China—an experience that contributed to the development
of Maxthon—when his employer transferred him to Singapore as a senior
engineer to figure out the technology for detecting forged documents.
Chen found Singapore’s greenery, lush flowers, and tropical climate
enjoyable but was bored, and he took up a hobby. “As I was surfing online, I
found that the browsers didn’t really suit my needs, so I decided to make my
own browser. It’s something I’m good at and something I can share with
friends,” he says.
Chen picked up the original source code for the browser from a university
student in Beijing who called himself Changyou. When the Falun Gong
devotee Changyou posted the code on an online bulletin board system and
disappeared into cyberspace, Chen, who took the name BloodChen for some
mysterious and unexplained reason, took over the project, spearheading an
online grassroots movement to make browsers better.
Over the summer of 2002, Chen developed a beta, or test, version of his
browser software. Working with software developers online, he detected bugs
or defects in his handiwork. Word spread among techies online. Soon Chen
was writing codes over the Web with as many as 50 software developers. No
one actually knew who Chen was. He was a virtual developer.
Maxthon grew out of a grassroots effort in the online tech community to
create a viable alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Microsoft had
overtaken Netscape in the late 1990s with tactics that sparked a headline-
grabbing antitrust suit when it pre-installed Internet Explorer browsers into
the Windows 95 operating system. Microsoft was criticized openly for failing
to innovate once it had market leadership. Two former Netscape workers in
the United States, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, shepherded a nonprofit group,
Mozilla.org, that rolled out the alternative browser Firefox in 2004. At about
the same time Firefox emerged, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean Chen
was hunched over his computer writing code for what became Maxthon.
Both Maxthon and Firefox came with lots of built-in functions for easy
and personalized surfing on the Web. The main difference is that Firefox has
Netscape as its rootstock, whereas Maxthon is built on the same code used in

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