Intresting read...

No News Is Good Blogging from NYTimes

"Whatever they come up with, the companies won't be competing with Office, but with Microsoft's coming upgrades to Hotmail and Outlook, as well as a new suite of collaboration software, writes Mary Jo Foley on Microsoft Watch. And here, they may actually win, thanks largely to Microsoft's famous torpidity in releasing software. "Is there a hot technology arena where Microsoft has fielded a new product first over the past few months and others are scrambling to catch up?" she asks. "I am coming up blank."
$100 LAPTOPS Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab is known for highly imaginative - some say fantastical - prognostications on the power of technology. His latest effort, though, has a certain down-to-earth quality: he wants to put laptop computers into the hands of impoverished children around the world at a cost of just $100 apiece.
Since M.I.T. announced the One Laptop Per Child effort in January, five developing nations have signed on, and talks are under way with the state of Massachusetts, PC Magazine's Web site says. At Mr. Negroponte's talk at M.I.T.'s emerging technologies conference, the site notes, "one of the more interesting moments of the presentation came during a question-and-answer session, when an individual who had set up a computer network in Guatemala described coming back to check on the machines and finding them loaded with pornography." Welcome to the developed world."