What a love/hate relationship! Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop Per Child’s chairman, and Microsoft Corp. announced on Thursday that Microsoft would be offering Windows XP at a $3 license fee to be installed on the XO laptop. Targeted at $100, the XO laptop currently costs just under $200 and needs to meet critical mass to drop the price down to that level.
It is VERY telling though that Microsoft has finally agreed to offer it’s operating system to the OLPC initiative. First off, Microsoft is getting concerned about losing its’ market share in the Operating System category. The OLPC XO laptop currently runs Linux. Traditionally, Microsoft has been anti-open source. Also, Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard is increasingly gaining market share in the consumer sector and is expected to take another huge leap when the 3G iPhone is expected to be released worldwide in June. The IPhone runs a full version of Apple’s operating system. Microsoft is obviously slowly feeling pressure against it’s monopoly.
Second, it is highly likely people other than the children are buying and using the computers. And it IS government officials buying the laptops according to their preference according to the NY Times:
“The people who buy the machines are not the children who use them, but government officials in most cases,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the nonprofit group. “And those people are much more comfortable with Windows.”
I wonder if Microsoft really cares about getting it into the hands of the children as much as in the hands of government officials.
Given it’s trouble (and the hardware demands) of its’ Vista operating system, there is little doubt as to why Microsoft has offered XP to the OLPC group. Interestingly enough, it appears that Microsoft is not only limiting XP’s functionality for the XO laptop but also offering XP to Ultra-Low-Cost PCs such as the Asus Eee PC. I have several opinions on this but none more so than that these PCs can’t run the bloated, resource hogging operating system like Vista. So OLPC will be running a crippled version of XP. It makes me wonder why OLPC and Mr. Negroponte refused Steve Job’s offer to run a full version of the Mac OS X on their machines. The argument at the time was that the operating system software requirement needed to be open source.
Interestingly, Steve Jobs had offered Mac OS X free of charge for use in the OLPC program but the offer was declined. According to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative’s founders, the designers wanted an operating system that could be tinkered with, therefore Linux was chosen.
What is going to happen in the future? Well, remember that Intel competed with OLPC with its Classmate PC before pulling the plug. With the launch of Intel’s new mobile Atom processor coming out this year, it will be exciting to see if there is some form of an Apple/Intel collaboration on a OLPC-type initiative. Regardless, Apple will be able to launch a device that runs a full version of Mac OS X for very low cost. Competition is a good thing, even if people are competing to bring technology into the hands of the world’s children.
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