Did Microsoft really kill OLPC?
Submitted by srlinuxx on Wed, 11/19/2008 - 12:25.
I posted a number of pieces Monday about OLPC and its XO laptop (now for sale on Amazon in a reboot of the Give One Get One program), one of which declared that OLPC was dead. A year ago, that would have been worthy of a pretty serious flame war, especially considering that Jason Perlow’s and my pieces related to OLPC and the Amazon Kindle sat on the ZDNet homepage for most of a day. Now, as fellow blogger, Larry Dignan, notes, “What a difference a year makes.”
More than anything, I saw quite a bit of antipathy towards what used to be the darling of geek-dom (along with a general acknowledgment of just how much OLPC has actually contributed to this market). One reader did note, however,
“OLPC is dead because Microsoft killed it”
INTEL and Microsoft
INTEL did most of the heavy lifting.
Microsoft approved OLPC ? XO almost killed it ? OLPC survived ?
Microsoft gave OLPC legitimacy on its hardware. With stripped down OS, may use all the Microsoft apps? This will keep OLPC from obsolescence for a few more years. But, OLPC still needs a good speech recognition program from windows to survive as netphone(overcome language keyboard maps)?
Netphone uses no browsers, and survives by fax on email format. OLPC has to have a crash project in Linux to include netphone concept.
XO may be sweet, but it kills OLPC by isolating its capability of software interchangeability until a conversion or filter program can be had, to use gtk+ toolkit to install gnome apps?