“Wow, a Chinese version of Google-style working environment here!” That’s the first impression I have when I stepped into Maxthon office in Beijing. The toys around tables, the colorful decorations, candy boxes everywhere and other stuff create an innovative and comfortable working place for Maxthon staffs.

Back to the company itself, Maxthon, was founded by Jeff Chen in 2005. The company develops a free web browser with many creative features in mainly 3 areas: easy surfing, secure browsing and fully customizable. The name “Maxthon” comes from two words: Max and On since Mr Chen wishes to do something extraordinary and to build up a browser with as many innovative functions as possible compared to other Internet browsers such as Firefox and IE. Besides the name, Maxthon also has a very impressive slogan “The way we surf the world”.

Our speaker, Jeff Chen, is the CEO of Maxthon. He used to work in Singapore after graduating from a Chinese university. The living environment in Singapore made him have some free time to work on a web browser called MyIE, which became Maxthon later. Since he is with technical background, Mr Chen shared a lot about Internet technology for Maxthon during the presentation. Some of them can be found on the official website of Maxthon. And just to add on some useful information apart from the website, at the early stage, Maxthon sustained mainly because of donation and sponsorship. However, nowadays, more than 60% revenue comes from searching. Aother amazing point I want to address is that Maxthon does not focus too much on marketing. Their fame in China and beyond is acctually by world of mouth.

I think Mr Chen’s attitudes towards work and business may be the main reason to lead the success of Maxthon. Firstly, he does not look at short-term profit. Mr Chen put more efforts in designing a really cool web browser which can fullfill the users’ needs instead of focusing on how to generate profit from the product. He told iLeaders that generating revenue was not the main objective of Maxthon at current stage. Secondly, he believes that only free Internet services will have a bright future in Chinese IT market most of the time. Thirdly, he encourages and helps the employees to enjoy working in Maxthon. Most of the staff from the company feel that they are not really working. They are living on their own lifestyles in the office.

However, Mr Chen is not able to share their future strategic plan with us in detail. We don’t know what are the possible ways for Maxthon to generate profit in the long run. I personally feel that only focusing on web browser may not make the company sustainable in a long term. In addition, since Maxthon is using IE engine provided by Microsoft, how independent will the company be can be a potential problem. It may be necessary for Maxthon to have its own core technology on browser engine in the future.

Maxthon is still a young company. Let’s wish it to achieve its goal: lead the way we surf the world someday.

Tags: Maxthon

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