14 DAY TRIAL // After the moment when Bill Gates almost had a heart attack when he heard the plan to develop a $100 laptop, everybody started to get involved in a project such as this, everybody except Mr. Gates. The reason behind this is that Microsoft was almost ready to bring out Windows Vista, and Bill knew that if the OLPC project would be put into action, the only operating system viable for such a machine would have been Windows 98, 2000 at best. So the logical choice for an OS suitable for the hardware the OLPC was going to use, was a Linux-based operating system.
The party got bigger when ASUS expressed their desire of manufacturing a series of low-cost PC, aimed at developing nations. The first five products from the series are to be released in the second half of this year, priced at $199, $249, $299, $399 and $549. According to TaipeiTimes.com website, the panels for the low-priced laptops ASUS is going to manufacture are being produced by AU Optronics, and the storage will come in the form of Intel Solid State Disks, with capacities going up to 40GB.
Having a line of "cheap" notebooks for developing nations and charging as much as $549 per model isn't quite the example of a company that wishes to help the development by supplying cheap technology, but they are not the only ones that took this road. Too bad Bill Gates only wants to put Windows Vista on each and every desktop and portable computer in this world, otherwise there may have been chances that he could have promoted a Microsoft-based operating system, but then again, he'd have to write one, and since old Bill hasn't written a good piece of code since MS-DOS onwards, I wouldn't expect changes in that domain any time soon.