Microsoft working on trimmed down XP for XO

PC Magazine is reporting that Microsoft is trying its best to come up with a version of XP that’ll fit on the ultra-inexpensive XO (One laptop per child) computer.

This is very good news indeed. I’ve been blogging for awhile that Microsoft needs to develop a better “mobile” version of XP in order to compete with light weight devices like the XO and Intel’s MIDs. Microsoft needs to provide an alternative to Linux as it evolves over the next couple years. The way it looks to me is that Linux and OS X could become the de facto OSes for small devices.

There’s no way that Vista can fit within the Flash constraints these devices include–Vista is 3 to 4 times too big. So XP is the next best choice.

My only hope is that along the way the dev team realizes they should simplify the shell and make it more mobile friendly.

In terms of the XO, I also hope that the dev team is including the Tablet bits. Please, oh, please do so. It would be a good competitive advantage. After all the XO is essentially a Tablet. It folds down into a reading mode; it includes a digitizing strip that supports handwriting, and most importantly it has a mobile mentality. All of these features are Tablet minded features.

I’ll be blunt, if Tablet bits aren’t included, they’re making a terrible mistake. There’s no indication in the article that Will Poole’s group at Microsoft is considering Tablet bits. So I’m fearing the worst. This makes me shutter to the core. If Microsoft doesn’t see a Tablet in front of its nose, who else will?

Now one could argue that Tablet bits aren’t that crucial on the XO. After all, it doesn’t have a digitizer built into the display. That’s correct. It doesn’t. At least now. But it does have a digitizing strip meant for handwriting–and am I the only one that sees that supporting handwriting in an educational device is obvious? The XO team does. I hope that Microsoft’s team does too.

So maybe the Tablet bits are too big. My guess it’s a matter of “packaging” the code correctly. There’s a core that’ll make sense for the device. And this is what’s needed.

Just take Silverlight, for instance. If it can run on the XO, then there will be Tablet bits in the browser. And Silverlight is designed as an ultra-light-weight download. So if Silverlight can do include the Tablet bits, can’t a lightweight XP?

Oh, how I wish I was sitting in the room with the developers. They can do this. They can strip down XP. They can make a killer Tablet device out of the XO. And they can lay the path for a top-notch mobile experience. Maybe not everything is achievable in the first pass, but this is the opening that many of us have been cheering for. Please let it be.