And I bet they charge $300 to sell it with the laptops.

Ben ClarkeAnd I bet they charge $300 to sell it with the laptops.

Quite the opposite. I bet they give it away cheap in order to establish a foothold in the developing markets - could lead to big profits in the future.

Maybe. But this is MS we're talking about. They probably think that because it's a special version, they need to charge extra for it.

they are right in time to downgrade the natives. they never had a chance to learn the basics with linux. altough iam missing the candy there, but stop.. is ie not better suited for porn d/ls anyway ? what a mess :roll:

Free software to MS is sunlight to vampires. IT BURNS!!! IT BURNS!!!
MS will probably pay them to use it. Having millions of kids running open source[ maybe even programming:cry:] is there worse dream come true.
To me it seems stupid stuff like health care,food,clean water and not getting shot/chopped to death in a civil/ethnic war would be of more importance then learning to surf the web:wtf:

What are they developing it from: Vista or XP?

i duno what its based on but why dont they just run a it based on the old windows 3.1

I think it will be Windows XP based (Vista is far too much of a resource hog and would be more expensive to develop). As for Windows 3.1, that would be worse than Linux...

Don't they already sell XP and Vista Starter Edition to developing nations at an already low price? Doesn't seem like much work to just use it or adjust it a bit for the OLPC..

the XP and Vista starter varieties don't include the BSoD - that's how they keep the cost and sys requirements low. If you cut out 256MB of error messages, the OS is guaranteed to reboot quicker.

Hilarious! Didn't AMD and Microsoft join-up on some similar project last year? A project that collapsed. Something due to the fact they couldn't bring costs down to where it would be competitive vs. that "other" project?

Here is a link to an article dated November 12, 2006: AMD pulls plug on Personal Internet Communicator arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061112-8201.html

No matter how much you strip down the Windows CE, it's still bloated and it requires more hardware power (aka more cost) than some alternatives.

I mean, I understand why Microsoft wants a piece of the action, but they are deluding themselves if they think some type of stripped down Windows XP Embedded or CE will do the job. That's what happens when you spend most of your R&D budget on "prettying things up" and shiny GUIs.

People want pretty shit. Well most people.

Ben ClarkeMaybe. But this is MS we're talking about. They probably think that because it's a special version, they need to charge extra for it.

Oh, I'm sure they think that, but they will definitely give this away for free, just to get the market in their grasp. Microsoft doesn't even really care that so many people use their software for free (i.e., pirated copies) -- as long as you're using theirs and not someone else's OS, they're happy.