[Sugar-devel] Vision

[James Cameron]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 12:37:13PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 6:48 AM, James Cameron <[1]quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
> 
>     > but I can not find any evidence that XP was - [...] - ever shipped
>     > by OLPC, [...]
> 
>     None.  Windows XP required a PC architecture, which the early models
>     were capable of, and the systems were engineered, but there were no
>     customer orders, so we never shipped it.  (My guess is that people
>     said they wanted it, but when it came to the crunch they didn't).
> 
> My understanding is that performance was awful with the baseline
> hardware RAM, and the Windows license added $3 or so per unit,

Yes, that was the gossip at the time.

My opinion on reflection; the performance ratio between our low-cost
low-power hardware and the competition was already evident on Fedora
Linux; it didn't need Windows to expose it.  The incremental cost per
unit was down in the noise of other cost changes.

The gossip was a simple explanation that was easily carried by the
crowd.

> so naturally customers disdained the offer. There was loads of
> negative chatter on the Web at the time, silly memes that MS had
> somehow "taken over" OLPC were constantly repeated. OLPC made no
> effort to combat that perception, reasoning that what developers
> said on Slashdot was irrelevant and all that mattered was the
> competition for customer contracts, at the time Classmate PCs
> running Windows XP, sometimes with a proprietary kid-friendly
> interface. The world has changed since.

Yes, the world has changed.  Pocket computers with sensors, several
radios and voice network integration.  ;-)

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/