According to a Reuters report, Bill Gates openly mocked MIT’s $100 laptop program at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum March 15th.

Reuters quoted Mr. Gates: "The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk … and with a tiny little screen." and "If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type"

Earlier, Mr. Gates pitched modified cellphones as an alternative to the One Laptop per Child program. Before that, he offered an open source version of Windows CE to the MIT project.

Describing the $100 laptop on the One Laptop per Child website, project chairman Nicholas Negroponte writes:

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.

. . . .

One does not think of community pencils—kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful. Furthermore, there are many reasons it is important for a child to own something—like a football, doll, or book—not the least of which being that these belongings will be well-maintained through love and care.

We can see why Mr. Gates finds this objectionable.

Wait. No we can’t. Best case, he spoke without bothering to find out what’s up. Next best case, he fears the presumably unintended consequence of competition with his newly announced seven-inch Ultra-Mobile Computer. Worst case, he trashed One Computer per Child because its machine is Linux-based and financed by the likes of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat.

In any event, if you can’t say something nice…