Microsoft Getting Closer to OLPC Operating System

[Jimmy 2004]

Software giant Microsoft is making progress in creating a modified version of its Windows operating system designed to run on the XO laptop built by the One Laptop Per Child project. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Will Poole said:

We're spending a nontrivial amount of money on it. We remain hopeful with our progress to date, we still have significant work ahead to finalize our analysis and testing processes. At the end of the day, there's no guarantees.

The OLPC project intends to start producing its laptop next month, which is designed for elementary school children in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The laptops were originally designed to run Linux, however Microsoft hopes to develop a cut-down version of Windows in order to install it on the XO, with the biggest issues being reducing the power consumption and the space required by the operating system in order for it to run efficiently.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Jess Stingray]

And I bet they charge $300 to sell it with the laptops.

 

[Jimmy 2004]

And I bet they charge $300 to sell it with the laptops.

Quite the opposite. I bet they give it away cheap in order to establish a foothold in the developing markets - could lead to big profits in the future.

 

[Jess Stingray]

Maybe. But this is MS we're talking about. They probably think that because it's a special version, they need to charge extra for it.

 

[Scheich]

they are right in time to downgrade the natives. they never had a chance to learn the basics with linux. altough iam missing the candy there, but stop.. is ie not better suited for porn d/ls anyway ? what a mess

 

[unsmart]

Free software to MS is sunlight to vampires. IT BURNS!!! IT BURNS!!!
MS will probably pay them to use it. Having millions of kids running open source[ maybe even programming] is there worse dream come true.
To me it seems stupid stuff like health care,food,clean water and not getting shot/chopped to death in a civil/ethnic war would be of more importance then learning to surf the web

 

[WarEagleAU]

What are they developing it from: Vista or XP?

 

[regan1985]

i duno what its based on but why dont they just run a it based on the old windows 3.1

 

[Jimmy 2004]

I think it will be Windows XP based (Vista is far too much of a resource hog and would be more expensive to develop). As for Windows 3.1, that would be worse than Linux...

 

[Disparia]

Don't they already sell XP and Vista Starter Edition to developing nations at an already low price? Doesn't seem like much work to just use it or adjust it a bit for the OLPC..

 

[imperialreign]

the XP and Vista starter varieties don't include the BSoD - that's how they keep the cost and sys requirements low. If you cut out 256MB of error messages, the OS is guaranteed to reboot quicker.

 

[AddSub]

Hilarious! Didn't AMD and Microsoft join-up on some similar project last year? A project that collapsed. Something due to the fact they couldn't bring costs down to where it would be competitive vs. that "other" project?

Here is a link to an article dated November 12, 2006: AMD pulls plug on Personal Internet Communicator http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061112-8201.html

No matter how much you strip down the Windows CE, it's still bloated and it requires more hardware power (aka more cost) than some alternatives.

I mean, I understand why Microsoft wants a piece of the action, but they are deluding themselves if they think some type of stripped down Windows XP Embedded or CE will do the job. That's what happens when you spend most of your R&D budget on "prettying things up" and shiny GUIs.

 

[Steevo]

People want pretty shit. Well most people.

 

[mdm-adph]

Maybe. But this is MS we're talking about. They probably think that because it's a special version, they need to charge extra for it.

Oh, I'm sure they think that, but they will definitely give this away for free, just to get the market in their grasp. Microsoft doesn't even really care that so many people use their software for free (i.e., pirated copies) -- as long as you're using theirs and not someone else's OS, they're happy.