OLPC to Run Windows, Come to the US

An anonymous reader writes "'Yesterday Nicholas Negroponte, former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and current head of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project, gave analysts and journalists an update on the OLPC project. Two big changes were announced — the $100 OLPC is now the $175 OLPC, and it will be able to run Windows. Even in a market where there are alternatives to using Windows and Office, there's a huge demand for Microsoft software. The OLPC was seen as a way for open source Linux distributions to achieve massive exposure in developing countries, but now Negroponte says that the OLPC machine will be able to run Windows as well as Linux. Details are sketchy but Negroponte did confirm that the XO's developers have been working with Microsoft to get the OLPC up to spec for Windows.' We also find out that the OLPC gets a price hike and will officially come to the US. Could this be tied into Microsoft's new $3 Windows XP Starter and Office 2007 bundle? Now that the OLPC and Intel's Classmate PC can both run Windows, is Linux in the developing world in trouble?"

Comments

Sit Back And Watch

[QuantumG]

Microsoft influence is going to delay and eventually destroy this project.

It may not even be intentional, but that's what Microsoft does.

What was said, what you know, where it goes.

[twitter]

What was said:

OLPC hasn't changed the XO's design to support Windows, and has no formal partnership with Microsoft, he says.

What you know: RAM was stepped up from 64MB to 256MB, some kind of Windoze will run on it and real price is almost double the target price.

How much of that price increase is due to the RAM increase is speculation, but some of it is. The price of memory is always falling and we always see more memory in cheaper devices. At the same time Windoze always hogs up some expensive amount of it so it will always be hard to run Windoze on cheap devices. They suck like that and will pay the price sooner or later.

M$ dies when enough people don't need them. They want to have their hooks in the developing world but it's more important for them to make sure that no viable alternative exists in developed markets. They exist by making it hard for people to get away from them not by making their shit easier. They sabotage BIOS, forbid music formats and do everything in their power to make sure nothing but M$ works anywhere. Devices like Palm, Blackberry, smartphones etc, that don't run Windoze give them fits because it shows people they can get along without M$. OLPC is just the first of the free hardware projects, so M$'s strategy can't work forever. Sooner or later good enough devices are going to be cheap enough to not be able to support M$ licensing fees, and that will be the end of them. The "network effect" will be broken and both hardware and software will have to compete on merit rather than "yeah but will it run Word."