James Governor's Monkchips

links for 2007-07-16

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2 comments

  1. On Microsoft’s opening of Office format: Just because something is open does not automatically make it easy to use and integrate, well-designed, or even acceptable. Being open is just a precondition for being considered.

    I’m not holding my breath on that one. MS has a tradition of making simple things very complicated when there was no need to do that, simply to sell tools to use their, hum, open standards. See MSWord-generated HTML as an example.

  2. On Intel, they realized that if OLPC really takes off, we all are going to witness a massive paradigm shift in computing, the likes of which the world has hardly ever seen. Imagine 2 billion of those machines distributed over the next 5 years (that’s only 200 billion dollars, 1/2 of the US military’s yearly budget) and now imagine all those people writing programs and applications and using google apps (they get accounts to gmail with the machine, MS Word and Excel don’t run on OLPC, but firefox does and google apps do too). Blows the mind, don’t you think? Any company that does not get in at the ground floor (and the ground floor is quickly closing up because machines will soon ship) is going to be left behind.
    Remember that as these machines evolve and get better, the whole industry will shift. These kids will get smart, educated, they will get money, and they will buy things. They will know computing though the python-based OLPC desktop and will relegate Windows and OSX to “parent and grandparent stuff” along with the dos prompt.

    Now that this project has teeth, you’re going to see a whole bunch of players fall in rank. Negroponte might just get a Nobel Peace Prize for that. The OLPC will change the world. Mark my words.

    What I think will happen ultimately is that everybody in the world will ask for $100 computing. And the hardware vendors will provide it. There won’t be room in there for pay software. The software will have to be FOSS long-term. Sort of like Dell and Ubuntu, but on a much larger scale.

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