Microsoft and Intel, hand in glove, to kill the $100 PC

jiml8 · 08-15-2008, 05:39 PM

...but what wound up happening has changed the laptop marketplace.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle4472654.ece

justmovedtolinux · 10-02-2008, 03:02 AM

All these Big Corporations are money hungry!!!
They always thrash their competition ...

Linux Archive

pinniped · 10-02-2008, 03:20 AM

I don't see any basis for the claim that MS or Intel tried to "kill" the OLPC.

MS sees an emerging market and wants in on the action - so they poo-pooed Linux as they usually do and spent some effort getting a severely cut down version of XP onto the machine and making deals which would normally be considered illegal if it weren't for the fact that they can't really underprice a product to kill a free competitor. Well, in spite of all of MS's effort (and I don't think they put much effort in), XP still needs more storage space etc. to run on OLPC.

Intel on the other hand thought a low-power low-cost PC which was not for sale in the USA would be worth looking at - it could boost CPU sales. Besides, OLPC was going for AMD, and Intel wishes AMD would just go away. Other companies like Asus (with years of experience designing and building PCs) also thought a low-power el-cheapo laptop would be great and came up with their own products. The OLPC design, manufacturing, and testing just dragged on for a looong time and other people got in on the action - it's a simple matter of competition, not any evil plans by big evil corporations to kill the little guy. The bit about the machines not going for sale in the USA also changed pretty quickly - there's still a buck to be made.

H_TeXMeX_H · 10-06-2008, 05:57 AM

But, I don't see a part where they kill it, or it's only attempted ? If they tried to stop it, it's because of one thing: competition. Now, I disagree when they say that Intel is a monopoly. I mean, yes the Intel x86 platform is a monopoly, but AMD is just as competitive most times, many times even surpassing Intel. M$ on the other hand is a full-blown monopoly, there is no other way to describe it, they would have the most interest in either destroying such a project or replacing it with their own (running Window$) or making it run Window$.

Also, I caught a mistake:

Quote:

Third, it does not use software by Apple or Microsoft. Instead, it is run by Sugar, a free operating system devised by geeks for the love of it.

not quite, it's running Linux (FC to be precise), the window manager is called Sugar:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_myths...be_Linux-based