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A mouse is a mouse, right? You move it, it moves a thingy on the screen, it’s as simple as that. Well not when you’re a hardcore PC gamer it’s not. For these guys, a mouse is a precision tool that needs to react exactly how and when you want it to, or be laughed to the bottom of every scoreboard in town.

And you’re not going to get much more precise than the Sidewinder mouse from Microsoft: a resolution of up to 2000dpi (not that you’ll need it) and interchangeable teflon feet for a smoother glide. You can even swtich cursor speeds live in any game with three adjustable buttons on the top, insert small weights into the body of the mouse to alter momentum, and reprogram all the buttons. It all sounds pretty ridiculous, but you just can’t scoff at this array of options.

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Microsoft Corp. gave early testers their first glimpse of its next-generation Web browser Wednesday, and said Internet Explorer 8 will adhere to the same standards as competitors’ programs.Microsoft’s browsers, including the current Internet Explorer 7, gained notoriety among Web developers for handling Web page code differently than Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox, Apple Inc.’s Safari, the now-defunct Netscape Navigator and others.

For the most part, major non-Microsoft browsers and outside developers who built Web pages worked with agreed-upon technical standards, while Microsoft was accused of adding proprietary code to those standards. The result: Web pages that looked good in Internet Explorer but broke on other browsers, or vice versa.

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Microsoft Corp asked software developers to “bet on us” as it began making test versions available of Internet Explorer 8, an upgraded version of the main software used to browse the Web.At Microsoft’s MIX08 conference on Wednesday, the company’s chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, said the Web was at the center of everything Microsoft was doing as it seeks to expand beyond the desktop business it dominates.

“I know today that you have many amazing technology choices available to you, but I’d like you to bet on us,” Ozzie told an audience of Web developers.

Microsoft has been pushing for a “software plus services” strategy that uses the Internet to augment traditional software that runs on a computer’s hard drive.

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Microsoft has reversed its decision to make IE8 behave like IE7 unless specifically requested.

Wow. And even more surprising is their reason for making the change. In Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 on the IEBlog, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch says:

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

And in a press release titled Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie states that
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Traditionally, the big names of the IT industry make their predictions the day before CeBIT opens. This time, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was one of them and predicted ground breaking changes for the future.

While Bill Gates was considered the chief visionary among the Microsoft leadership, it seems that Steve Ballmer has taken on this role now. In his opening speech at CeBIT, he did not touch on any of the problems currently dogging the software giant, such as its intended takeover of Yahoo or the multi-million Euro fine imposed by the EU Commision. Instead, he gazed into his own personal crystal ball and shared what he saw with the crowd. His favourite word? Computing revolution. “In my 28 years at Microsoft, I’ve lived through four computing revolutions.” In his opinion, the first was when computers became affordable for a wide audience, the second was the development of the graphics user interface, the third the rise of the internet, with the fourth being the interactive Web 2.0.

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