By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter

Tmax Soft, a mid-sized local software maker, hogged the headlines when it declared it would do the impossible, which was presenting a new computer operating system to trump the Microsoft Windows omnipresence.

Three months after its super-charged summer news conference, however, company officials are suddenly shying away from bold predictions.

The company had planned to market its Tmax Window operating system, Tmax Office desktop applications and Tmax Scoutor Web browser by the start of November.

However, skepticism had been growing as Tmax has yet to release the first beta version of any of its products.

In a telephone conversation with The Korea Times, a Tmax official admitted that the release date of Tmax Window has been pushed back to next year, and may not even make it during the first six months.

``We haven't officially announced that the debut of Tmax Window has been delayed, but it's obvious that a release by the end of the year is impossible,'' said the Tmax official, adding that the company needs more time to adjust flaws and improve software performance and security.

He also said changes have been made to the company's marketing plans for Tmax Window, although declining to elaborate any further.

Some industry sources believe that Tmax is looking to test its products on business users first, rather than sticking to its original plans of delivering them to individual users out of the gate, which could mean that the wait for Tmax Window may get even longer.

``The company will try to release Tmax Window and the other software products by the first-half of next year, but we are not ready to make any promise on whether we will be able to do that. We have no intentions of hasting the debut of Tmax Window before the product is ready to go,'' said the official.

A November release would have certainly annoyed Microsoft, which has just released Windows 7, the latest version of its dominant computer operating system.

The U.S. software giant hasn't been too happy about Tmax repeatedly claiming itself to be a potential challenger to the Windows supremacy.

It even threatened to sue the Korean company for trademark infringement over its decision to call its product ``window,'' which one Microsoft Korea official denounced as ``very Chinese-like.''

It remains to be seen whether Tmax could give Microsoft something to worry about other than namesake. The company revealed a glimpse of its hyped-up computer operating system in a lavish news conference in July, which drew more than 2,000 industry officials and journalists and was broadcasted live on the Internet.

However, throughout numerous demonstrations during the day, Tmax Window came off looking like the software equivalent of Swiss cheese, more distinctive for its holes than substance.

Despite the company's claims of Tmax Window being ``perfectly'' interoperable with Microsoft Windows-based programs such as Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer (IE), it took more than 30 seconds to open a Microsoft Words file during a demonstration.

Tmax wasn't even able to test online banking and e-commerce applications, which are enabled only through Microsoft's Active-X tool that works on IE Web browsers.

Perhaps, the lowest point of the news conference was when Tmax officials somehow needed to demonstrate Tmax Office on Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, instead of Tmax Window.

The news conference left many wondering whether the company could have Tmax Window ready for the market in just three to four months. Some tech experts, including Channy Yoon from Daum (www.daum.net), even accused Tmax of relying heavily on open source programs to develop their software products, claiming them as their own inventions to sell for a price.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr