'Software is too fat', says $100 laptop founder

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child project, has criticised the software industry for creating ever-more-bloated software, which runs slower each year despite dramatic improvements in processor speed.

During his keynote speech at the LinuxWorld conference in Boston today, Negroponte said: "We've gotten to a point where, in my opinion, every single new release of software is distinctly worse than the previous one. I just got the fastest laptop on the planet, it is the slowest, most unreliable machine I have had in my life."

Adding too many features without considering the impact on efficiency is the main reason, according to Negroponte, who is also co-founder of the MIT Media Laboratory.

"A fat person uses most of their energy to move the fat," he said, as an analogy.

He claimed that he had been joking for years that every time Intel releases a faster chip, the latest release of Windows uses a greater proportion of the total processing power.

"Fifteen or twenty years ago I used to joke, you know what, every time Andy [Grove] makes a faster processor, Bill [Gates] uses more of it," said Negroponte.

But the open source operating system Linux, which is touted by vendors as more efficient than Microsoft Windows, is no different, he claimed. "And Linux is no exception - Linux has gotten fat too," he said.

As part of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which aims to provide affordable laptops to millions of children in developing countries, Red Hat is tailoring Linux to run on lower-specification machines.

Mike Evans, Red Hat's vice president of corporate development, said in February that the project will help to drive the take-up of Linux in countries such as the US, as well as in the developing world.

Negroponte called on the conference attendees to focus on writing more efficient software.

"If there's anything you take away today, it is to rethink how systems can be simpler and faster," he said. "People just aren't thinking about small, fast, thin systems. It's not about a weak computer - it's about a slim, trim, fast computer."

The OLPC project, known for touting a $100 laptop, plans to complete its prototypes in the third quarter of 2006, and hopes they will start appearing in schools in December 2006 or January 2007. The laptops will cost around $135 in 2007 - but the cost is expected to fall to $100 in 2008 and to $50 in 2010, according to Negroponte.

Ingrid Marson writes for ZDNet UK