Its one thing to explore the limits of what technology can do for you, but it takes an entirely different mindset to figure out and limit what technology may do for you. How cheap can laptops get and still be useful? We are seeing this with many new products such as the XO-1 laptop from OLPC, The Eee PC from Asus, and many other ultra low-cost PCs as they are being called. One common theme across these cheap laptops has been the use of Linux. This article from PC World point out to an interesting effort from those people in Redmond. From PC World:

Microsoft plans to offer PC makers steep discounts on Windows XP Home Edition to encourage them to use that OS instead of Linux on ultra low-cost PCs (ULPCs). To be eligible, however, the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs.

The program is outlined in confidential documents that Microsoft sent to PC makers last month, and which were obtained by IDG News Service. The goal apparently is to limit the hardware capabilities of ULPCs so that they don't eat into the market for mainstream PCs running Windows Vista, something both Microsoft and the PC vendors would want to avoid.

 It used to be that Microsoft would ask you "Where do you want to go today?". We'll, now they want to tell us where we sohuld not be going tomorrow. Go figure.