Microsoft has now confirmed it has a team of more than 10 engineers - part of a hardware group employing some 200 people - working on chipset design. The new range of MS mice incorporate a home-grown chipset built from the ground up at MS replacing the one bought in from Agilent for earlier rodents.
Mr Softee`s engineers are based in Redmond and Fort Collins and designed the new IntelliEye technology used in the latest versions of IntelliMouse Optical, IntelliMouse Explorer and the new Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer.
A spokesman for Microsoft in the US told the Inq:
"We made the decision to bring the IntelliEye technology in house to enable ourselves to provide the best possible customer experience with an optical mouse and of course differentiate our products from [the] competition.
"This allowed us to overcome one of the most common complaints received regarding the products ability to keep up with a fast moving hand. With control over the design, we are also able to make key product trade-off such as optimising for wireless applications.
"For example, we didn’t have to make trade offs between tracking speed and power management like other leading competitors.
"We design and develop products with our own engineers etc and use 3rd party companies with manufacturing capabilities to produce or final design and developments. We have not disclosed who the silicon manufacturer is and have no plans to at this stage."
MS is at pains to remind us that every other optical mouse on the market uses the same Agilent silicon it abandoned. According to the spokesman, the catalyst for creating this proprietary optical technology was a lack of features being offered on the market.
"Our research indicated that consumers wanted increased accuracy and performance from their mouse due to a common complaint -- lost and slow cursors. We set out to solve this problem but ran into limitations from the third party technology. So, MS developed its own chip to meet and exceed consumer demand."
Indeed the new mice boast a scanning speed of over 6,000 frames a second - more than 40 per cent higher than other optical chips. The first MS optical mouse could only manage a paltry 1,500 fps. Microsoft`s hardware group has been around for 20 years and comprises ergonomists, industrial designers, engineers and technologists.
Future plans include a move into imaging products, details of which the company remains delightfully coy.
