I will list the ways in which OLPC has influenced the target market which probably defines the interest of most readers of OLPC News, the angle from which most bloggers and industry commentators have been talking about the OLPC project for the past 4 years, which is how OLPC technology may affect the rich Western country's PC/Laptop industry.

With English as the dominant language used by Linux developers in much of the world, Japanese and Chinese software and hardware developers have a huge hurdle to overcome. Having enthusiastic attendees at Linux symposiums staged in Japan does help, but culture and language differences still get in the way.

As Ubuntu popularity grows, more and more students are recognizing the added features and potential savings offered by an Ubuntu laptop. Netbooks and laptops are the students solution to computing because of obvious portability reasons.

"Fortune magazine has an interesting article stressing the Chinese market's importance to Microsoft's long term strategy, and touching on Linux's involvement in the Chinese market."

Ordinarily, the only place you see these programs are in laptops and the methods should work on laptops, and there are many places to go for information on the specialized laptop tweaks and GNOME and KDE laptop configuration options.

The laptop market has been absolutely turned on its head in the last 12 months. It used to be all about how much power you could fit into a small form factor. And yet, in the year that Alienware has unleashed its frighteningly quick Area-51 m15x gaming laptop, all anyone wants to talk about is the latest low-end Eee PC rival to have broken the £300 barrier.

One of the nagging problems for Linux is that the most popular laptops are still codesigned by Microsoft and its OEMs. It's not for nothing that laptops come with stickers on the bottom that say, “Windows Vista—Business OEM Software” or whatever. These are not white boxes. You can get Linux running on them, but the hermit crab approach isn't the swiftest route to market leadership.

2008 was an eventful, breakthrough year for many open source companies, and 2009 will be even more so, especially in terms of business purchasing patterns, software business model shifts, and enterprise software stack evolution.

While speaking recently with one of my bosses, I was told I will receive a new business laptop in 2009. Now, for the problem: It will be running Windows Vista or Windows XP. Hooray for new gear. Boo for Luddite attitudes.