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Microsoft plans to expand its operations in India over the next couple of years by opening centres in new locations. At present, the software major is present in 12 Indian cities- Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kochi Indore, Mumbai, New Delhi, Pune, Nagpur, Ahmedabad and Chandigarh.

Jean-Philippe Courtois, president (international operations), Microsoft said that they intended to expand their operations in India to 30 centres over the next couple of years.He said that they had one of their biggest research lab’s in India. Their focus on India would continue to grow, he added.

Microsoft also plans to increase its headcount in the country. Courtois said that they would increase the headcount from the existing 5,000 by a couple of thousand. Courtois was in Bangalore to discuss e-governance initiatives for the Karnataka government. Microsoft has submitted a letter of intent to launch the ‘paper-less office’ concept in the government.

Sudhakar Rao, principal secretary to Karnataka chief minister H.D.Kumaraswamy, said that Microsoft has evinced interest in implementing the ‘paper-less office‘ project across all departments in a phased manner in the state. He said it would eliminate the dependence on paper work in government offices. This would help the state serve the public better, he added.

Initially, Microsoft will launch the ‘paper-less office‘ concept in Karnataka’s IT&BT department. This project will run on a trial basis. Subsequently, it will be extended to other departments. The letter of intent submitted by Microsoft enables the government to use the company’s software applications for e-governance projects.

The project will not have any financial implication on the state. Microsoft and Karnataka are expected to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) shortly to implement the e-governance projects. Microsoft has declared many plans for India in past too, many being CSR motivated.

Microsoft said that it may take decades to tackle software piracy in large emerging economies despite some recent progress and called on Asian governments to invest more in policing the practice.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer said that they were realistic in recognising that they had to work diligently over periods, that were really a decade or two, to make real progress in a number of those environments.

Mundie, one of the two successors to Microsoft founder Bill Gates next year, said progress had been made in countries like China and Vietnam in recent years to tackle software piracy, which cost the company billions of doller each year. However, he said more needed to be done to police the problem.

Mundie said that most of the Asian counties have the laws, some have regulations they probably need tuning up, but the biggest weakness is that very few of them have made the necessary investments on the enforcement side.

Microsoft has made progress in China where the piracy rate has dropped to 82% this year from 94% four years ago, he said. The piracy rate is a measure of the level of pirated software in the country. China president Hu Jintao last year pledged to crack down on software piracy.

He said microsoft expected to continue to grow its workforce and research and development capability in countries outside its dominant US market, such as India. The software company has been expanding beyond its Windows and office software businesses, saying Web services and customer devices are key to the company’s future.

Microsoft has lost a preliminary vote to have its Office Open XML document format approved as an international standard, denting the company’s hopes of wider adoption of the standard by public sector organisations.

The result of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) ballot announced was hailed as a victory for open standards by supporters of the rival Open Document format, who argued the Microsoft format was not open, but a poly to lock in users.

Microsoft failed to capture a two-thirds majority in the vote to approve the file format as a global standard, but the group will meet in February to hammer out a consensus, allowing the world’s largest software maker more time to grab votes.

Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) is the default file-saving format in Microsoft office 2007, the latest version of its dominant productivity software. The Open Document Format (ODF) has already genered international standard status from the ISO. om Robertson, general manager of interoperability and standards at Microsoft said that they belived that the final tally in early 2008 would result in the ratification of Open XML as an ISO standard.

Microsoft argues that its format has higher wpecification and is more useful than ODF, while opponents say Open XML’s 6000 pages of code compared with Open Document Format’s 860 pages make it complicated and untranslatable into other formats. Free and rival productivity software suite OpenOffice.org uses (ODF), an open standard supported by International Business Machines(IBM) and Sun Microsystems.