"Microsoft wants to make its Windows operating system available on the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) notebook computers, OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte said at the NetEvents conference in Hong Kong on Saturday," according to VNUnet.
"I have known [Microsoft chairman] Bill Gates his entire adult life. We talk, we meet one-on-one, we discuss this project," said Negroponte, vnunet.com can reveal.
"We put in an SD slot in the machine just for Bill. We didn't need it but the OLPC machines are at Microsoft right now, getting Windows put on them."
Comment: Unfortunately, VNUnet seems to assume Microsoft is putting Windows XP on the machines, which is unlikely though (with XP Embedded) possible. Much more likely is a version of Windows CE, which is already used in mobile phones (as Windows Mobile), and which is "shared source".
However, Microsoft already tried this. CE was used in the AMD PIC third-world computer, which flopped. The main appeal of running "real" Windows XP on a $300 laptop, rather than a $150 OLPC, is that users can pirate expensive mainstream software, especially Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and loads of games. They can't do that with CE, so what's the point?
Footnote: Another report from the same event, Negroponte: Laptops are like "fat people", says:
Explaining his analogy, Negroponte explained that as fat people use most of their muscle to move their fat, conventional laptops need more ever more muscle to move the fat of bloatware on them. This makes them prone to instability, Negroponte said: "My (conventional) computer, Crashes five times a day."
This is odd. Negroponte is a Mac user. Hasn't he upgraded to OS X?
