Microsoft leaps into OLPC fray

Apparently Microsoft has submitted a request to have the One Laptop Per Child project modify their systems to run Windows XP. Wikipedia has a reasonable summary of the OLPC project, including some of the debate surrounding the environmental-friendliness of a project to get one laptop into the hands of every child on the planet, as well as usability concerns and the failure to meet the $100 price-point.

The main concerns of the OLPC were intense durability, resistance to dirt and water, high screen visibility outdoors, low power consumption with easy rechargeability in primitive conditions, and a large stable of educational software. They also have the ability to form ad-hoc networks amongst themselves if other OLPCs are nearby, with two little antennas and the bright green color giving the computer a very insect-like look. Right now, they are offering a promotion to US consumers: for $400, they’ll sell you an OLPC and send one to a third-world country on your behalf.

What’s interesting to me is this move by Microsoft to allow Windows XP to run on the laptop. I see it as a concession that their joint effort with Intel’s “Classmate” low-cost laptop has, if not failed, then run into hard times competing with the mind-share of the OLPC. They cite the “tens of thousands of existing educational applications written for Windows” as reason for justifying putting Windows XP on the OLPC rather than the Free Linux operating system.

I own a Linux laptop which was built in 1998. It’s a little Sony Vaio. It has 192MB of RAM, a dinky little 12-inch screen, and a 366MHz Pentium III processor. It is currently running Gentoo Linux, and as long as I’m careful not to run more than a few applications at a time, it runs just fine. It’s a little bit slow loading the latest and greatest version of Firefox, but there is never any typing lag and until it got accidentally fried to where it’s no longer reliable, I used it all the time and was very productive with it, including using OpenOffice and email applications.

I tried installing Windows XP… and it simply doesn’t work. Just loading “notepad” took 30+ seconds in such a limited memory configuration. I had to take a coffee break if I wanted to load Microsoft Office. And I can plain forget about running the Microsoft Visual Studio (the development environment for MS applications)… it just hangs the box forever.

My thought is that, well, Kudos to Microsoft for wanting to get involved in bringing personal computing to the Third World, but how they are going to get such a bloated beast to run well in such a limited environment will be a challenge.