BANGALORE: Last year in July, when a senior engineer Kai-Fu Lee told Microsoft
CEO Steve Ballmer he was leaving the company to join Google, the latter
raved and ranted, vowing to 'kill' Google. Now comes another blow to Ballmer
that would give him reasons to fret and fume.
Microsoft's ex-employee Paul Maritz, who spent 14 years in Microsoft from
1986 to 2000 is all set to release a competitor product for Windows.
Maritz who started PI
Corporation and has a development center in Bangalore working on next
generation software environment, that will allow users to create, repurpose,
store, share and access personal information in novel ways. PI expects to
release its software in both free (open source) and licensed forms shortly.
In the company's website, Maritz says that PI is working on simple metaphors
for managing all information that one has to access to, send, receive, search
for, and publish. “We build off the simple metaphors of: Searching,
Subscribing and Aggregating, or Collecting, into manual and automated views of
information and Sharing and Publishing. Variations of these techniques have been
used widely for information published on web servers and accessible from your
browser. At PI we take these idea's and extend them to encompass information
that lives on your desktop or laptop, and to encompass information that lives in
documents of any type, not just web pages or emails”, he says.
In addition to the basic sharing capabilities PI users will be able to choose
task appropriate "skins" that combine sophisticated functionality with
the user's information to ease the task at hand — examples may be seeing
information organized by where the information came from (an “email view”),
organized by time (a “calendar” view), or by task.
“One of the failings of today's tools is that it is hard to get back the
complete context of a task. Think of being in a meeting and all the items of
information that are relevant: presentations, a list of attendees, private notes
by you, notes you wish to share, notes by others, action items. Finally, we
believe that users should have their PI always available to them, wherever they
are and whatever device they are using. PI accomplishes this allowing
information to be replicated across machines and devices, freeing the user from
being dependent on a single device,” says Maritz.
PI Corporation is backed by global private equity firm Warburg Pincus,
amongst other key holdings. Aditi
Corporation is key partner in India.
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