Easy enough for CEO's to demo
Recently, Citrix personified the promise of running any software, on any device by showing off Windows 7 running on the XO laptop via their new Receiver software.
"We want to make things simple and what better way to show it then on a very simple machine like the OLPC," said the Citrix CEO.
While Critrix considered this a great example of their efforts, not everyone was impressed:
"We could do that with VMware View since 2007," responds Jerry Chen, senior director of desktop virtualization at Vmware.
Rather than try so hard to virtualize Windows on the XO, I am really wondering why no one wants Windows XP on the XO in real life.
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It seems to me that this is essentially just an optimized "remote desktop" style system (which works great on the OLPC to access Windows RDP and VNC desktops) that takes advantage of virtualization to improve the experience -- and not actually Windows 7 running on the OLPC?
From the Citrix website on the Receiver iPhone app, emphasis mine:
Simply install, login, and work. Citrix Receiver gives you instant, real-time access to Windows apps and docs hosted in your corporate XenApp environment. ... With Citrix Receiver, only keyboard input, screen gestures and screen updates traverse the network. This means that data, like e-mail and intellectual property, remains safe and secure on your company network and never gets sent to or stored on your iPhone.
Seems like a misleading statement from Citrix as to what is being virtualized where -- not to mention what kind of server would it take to handle 100s of virtual Windows 7 computers being remotely accessed from OLPCs, and what the OLPC would or could do when it was not connected to the network (or if the server crashed/lost power/etc.)