14 DAY TRIAL // OLPC's relative success pushed Microsoft forward with a "business proposition", as the company executives sensed that there's some dough in for them. After having consciously sabotaged the project by selling discounted versions of their software in the OLPC markets, Microsoft wants to take down two birds with a single shot: why not sell their software along with the (increasingly) popular sub-notebook?
Microsoft's general manager, James Utzschneider, said in an interview that the company has already assigned 40 employees and contractors to find solutions. The company has, however, some doubts that they can do it, since they need to come out with a hacked version of Windows XP to run on the hard-drive-less notebook. The available 1GB of storage is far from enough, since Windows XP and Office require at least 2GB of memory and Microsoft is trying to convince OLPC to introduce an SD slot for storage supplementations.
If OLPC decides to perform the hardware modification, the low-cost operating system and the Office bundle will be delivered on a 2GB SD card that can be purchased separately and used with the laptop. In order to benefit from the new market, the Microsoft team will first have to rewrite the XO BIOS software to make the computer able to boot from the SD card.
This is just the beginning, since the XO notebook would need extra software to "accept" a Windows-based operating system. The special display, the mesh network card as well as the camera need additional drivers and the Microsoft engineers would have to come up with almost ten of them until January.
"To support all of that takes time", Utzschneider said, but mentioned that Microsoft has been working with OLPC for a year, though all this time has mostly been wasted due to the machines' absence that prevented the software designers from testing the applications. "We wanted to come out and say flat out that's not the case", Utzschneider continued. "Despite all of the rhetoric, we don't think we can have a production version until the second half of 2008."
Microsoft is awaiting for the trial results before finally deciding whether they will release the XO Windows XP version, but there is a long and complicated road ahead. "It's clearly our goal to ship a release", Utzschneider said. "But we are not confident that the combination of all of this will work with the quality people would expect with Windows XP running on a laptop".