The Hindu : National : After PC, what? Maybe, PI

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Thursday, Apr 22, 2004

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National

After PC, what? Maybe, PI

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, APRIL 21. After 14 years at Microsoft, helping to develop and market a whole family of Windows-based products, Paul Maritz decided that what the world needed was a successor to the Personal Computer (PC) — harnessing the Web and increasingly available bandwidth, to allow users to create, store, share and access their personal information (PI) in novel ways.

And he has come to Bangalore to make it happen.

Announcing the launch of a new company — Pi Corporation ( www.picorp.com) — Seattle-based Mr. Maritz said here today: ``It is clear that India is becoming a global powerhouse for software development, and it is appropriate that leading edge development can now be done here.''

Picorp, which has received substantial funding from equity investor Warburg Pincus, already has a core human resource of eight in position here — using Bangalore-based software developer, Aditi Corporation, as an incubator. It expects to create a 50-strong team very soon.

The software product, planned for a 2005 release, will initially harness the Linux platform in both free (open source) and licensed forms — ironical coming from a Microsoft veteran. But Mr. Maritz has his reasons: ``Linux on the desktop is where Linux on the server was five years ago. It's use is more widespread than most people realise,'' he says.

``I believe the Pi software can play a significant role in rounding out the Linux Desktop offering.''

While the exact details of the PI offering are still tentative, Mr. Maritz told The Hindu that it would harness three technologies — cheap and ubiquitous bandwidth, both wired and wireless; the emerging peer-to-peer sharing regime and new-generation database and search tools.

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