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Microsoft ex-staff to launch rival Windows

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CIOL Bureau
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Srinivas R

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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.

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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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