After reading this article about how the OLPC initiative is going to embrace Windows on the XO, I was struck about how sometimes being focused on a single solution can be detrimental to your goals.

Negroponte said he was mainly concerned with putting as many laptops as possible in children's hands.

On the surface, this is laudable. However this is a silly goal unless there's a corollary. In the OLPC project, education is the corollary. Without the education aspect, we may as well expect the XO's to be used mainly for browsing MySpace and internet porn. So simply "getting laptops... in children's hands" isn't sufficient. They don't need laptops so much as they need learning tools. If the laptop isn't a learning tool then it's just more strain on the environment and a distraction from real solutions.

This is where Negroponte's narrow vision begins to fail his goal.

Proprietary software, such as Windows, OSX, or Flash, isn't viable as a learning environment unless you are able to spend money to make it into one. The entire point of OLPC is to get learning tools into the hands of children who have no money. Providing them with proprietary software is providing them with a dead-end solution. Will Microsoft continue to provide them with free upgrades that are available over low-bandwidth connections? What about development tools and API's? Can we expect that in ten years the XO will be as up-to-date as Windows 98 is today? Microsoft doesn't have a good track record of supporting legacy software and interfaces nor for providing an inexpensive upgrade path.

I consider providing Windows-based XO's the equivalent of selling African farmers crop seeds that contain the so-called "death gene". It solves their immediate problem today, but gives them no way to become self-sufficient. In fact, all it guarantees is that they will become locked into the corporate food-chain and another revenue source for Microsoft (or more likely, another abandoned project, once the PR has faded).