The simple fact is that Microsoft wants Windows on these things in order to kill off the whole project. An XO with Sugar can do almost anything a child wants it to do. An XO with Windows? Can’t do squat, at least not in comparison to Sugar (if you haven’t used Sugar on an XO, then you have *no* idea). Sugar is fun, Windows is not. Consequently, Windows-based XO laptops will sit idle, the OLPC project loses credibility, XO orders get canceled, Microsoft execs wring their hands with glee. No potential competitors growing up in *this* country!

Furthermore, since an XO with Windows can run MS Office and other software that suits adults just fine, in a town with very few (or no) computers it’s a near certainty that the adults will appropriate all those idle Windows-based XOs for themselves in order to put the family finances or the town budget into Excel (cuz you *know* Microsoft will ship Office on each one). The corrupt government officials and poor parents in 3rd-world countries get their free computers, the corrupt corporations in the US get to kill off another competitor, everyone’s happy. The problem is that the kids will be back where they started, growing up without the ability to challenge the technological status-quo, which of course does keep the governments and corporations very happy.

The biggest, brightest, free-thinking minds in the whole world are growing up right now in developing nations. The XO and Sugar are about letting those kids learn, invent, and express themselves, not to grow up to be cubicle-dwelling drones.

The incorporation of mesh networking and collaborative based software is a huge reason why Sugar is lovely. It is also important that the kids learn these skills because online collaboration is the future both in the developing worlk and in the industrialized world offices.

The problems with the XO laptop, however, are that many of the programs are insufficient for the longer term uses of the computer. Sugar is great for 1st-5th graders, but what about high schoolers? I don’t htink that sugar has the sophistication to handle programs which people will need at later ages. Later in life people need to at least know some windows programs. I can’t imagine skype/voip ever being brought to Sugar (thought don’t know if the processor would be fast enough for it). The limitations of advanced programs lead one to want more; most likely through a windows setup, but maybe a ubuntu system could work.

the general layout is promising and upcome of better cpu´s from the pda sector with new multimedia-codecs couls make this thing cheaper than 200 dollars including wifi, mesh/ bluetooth linkup to allkinds of 3g/ public internet devices .. the truely nneded cellphone extention anybody was looking out for at a pricetag of 1/3 rd of an i-phone.

if it runs android i´ll buy one.

The reality is, whether by purchase or theft, most foreign universities use M$ products for their classes.

Some enlightened places have switched to OpenOffice and the like, but they aren’t the majority yet.

There are orders of magnitude more university admission applications than spots in many of the XO target nations, particularly when considerations is given that scholarship money will be required. Keep in mind – in many of the places where XO/Sugar will be used, that ONE computer will get shared by everyone in the household because they can’t afford another one. XO will transition from a kids computer to an everything computer by necessity.

Many of these locales still consider a US/European/Canadian education the benchmark and will want their kids to be more than qualified on the dominant tools in the industrialized world – it will be a source of accomplishment and pride as well as a discriminator for scholarships in-country.

Finally consider that the elite of the coutry who do not get educated abroad will be in these in-country schools as well and will be literate on the M$ products.

Rather than see a kid lose out due to the (justified) alarm raised by including a product from a clearly commercially aggressive company, I’d rather make sure that these kids have ALL the tools – including Windows and M$ product literacy – necessary to change their lives and the lives of their families for generations. If M$ makes Sugar and the like more valuable, so much the better.

Sometimes the Devil gets in the room, even when you’re watching. The key is to keep close to an exit door and run like heck when the opportunity arises. Once XO (in whatever configuration) begins to gain critical mass via shipments, much of this will begin to settle and M$ won’t be settling near the top because the country government’s themselves won’t want it.

“Be able to run” does NOT say ‘must be installed running”. Like the dual-boot Mac, the fact that any machine can at any time be booted into Windows means the Windows-oriented bureaucrats have no way to exclude them on the basis of Windows incompatibility.

Anecdotally, very few of the Macs which were bought on the basis that they COULD run Windows end up running it other than occasionally. I expect the same with the XO Laptop.

I heard about this really great foundation which had billions of dollars and was set up to do exactly this kind of thing. You know, fund projects so they didn’t have to rely on business principles. What was its name? The Bill and Melinda somebody foundation? I heard it had $30 billion and was given another $30 billion by some rich guy named Buffet. WOW. $60 billion. How much do you think it would cost to fund the whole OLPC project? They could do it. I wonder why I haven’t heard that story in the news?

The assertion, ‘it also makes sense for those same children to learn a Windows operating system, so when the time comes to go to university—certainly an underlying goal of this education-geared program—they have access to the technology used among the rest of the world.’ How many of these children from the poorest countries on earth are ever going to get the chance to attend university? Seriously. And by the time they do why do you believe Microsoft will still be the dominant operating system and business software? Why is it ‘certainly’ an underlying goal of the project? OLPC will never achieve that goal alone. Nor was it ever meant to achieve that goal. You seem to have a very twisted idea of what OLPC can achieve.

If you cannot write objectively become a PR agent and be as subjective as you like. Please stop wasting our time writing this kind of biased drivel.

That report by NetAppications.com is at odds with the one from W3Counter.com which puts Linux market share at 2.02%. That’s a far cry from NetApplications.com’s .68%. Do you think NA’s figure would have been closer to W3C’s if Red Hat was NA’s primary partner rather than Microsoft? The companies who fall for such wishful thinking and sponsor endorsed reports are running out of oxygen. The people creating those reports and the analysts who align themselves with them are not endearing themselves to those who have found a better way to create and market software. They will be the future employers.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8

Like or not, the majority of the “wonderful” business world is using Windows. As an enterprise IT guy who also deal with purchasing contracts in years, I have to speak out the not-so-welcome truth — The overall cost of hardware/software/network/server/maintenance/upgrade/training/scalability is lower. That’s why biz stuck with it. Mac and Linux haven’t really come up such package to compete against Microsoft. A couple of Mac/Linux computers at home or school have not much weight when it comes to the real business.