Microsoft takes stock

The bad news first? Software giant Microsoft is going slow with its plans for India. Its experience so far in India has been nothing too good, as they claim. Mr Steve Ballmer, President, Microsoft Corp. revealed this at a gathering of Asian reporters at its Redmond headquarters.

Microsoft has a software development centre at Hyderabad, which was opened in September 1998. This is a part of its network in Asian countries like Japan, Korea, China and Singapore. The Hyderabad centre is working on the cross platform operability of Microsoft's Windows NT network operating system and its BackOffice software products besides another new technology area called COM + which is an extension of COM (Component Object Module). COM is a technology standard for sharing of common object modules among programs, which Microsoft has been developing and using in its products.

The problem with India is its high levels of piracy and shortage of good talented people, for Microsoft in India. While Microsoft is willing to invest money, it expects to use local talent to run the operations.

Microsoft looks at the past twenty years as the year of the PC while the next 15-20 years is expected to be PC+. The PC era cannot be believed to be over, when a hundred million PCs are expected to be sold this year.

Microsoft has taken note of the progress that Linux, the competitive new operating system, has been making. Its threat is more on the mindshare, rather than any market share in value terms since Linux, as a free software has attracted attention for this concept as much as for its software capabilities. Linux seems to have started the concept of free software and other vendors seem to have taken note of this. Steve Ballmer has indicated that they would think of making available part of their Windows software source code free to users.

Interesting times ahead, right?