Negroponte tells software industry to slim down

That includes you, Gates

Nicholas Negroponte has criticized the software industry, including those building Linux, for churning out bloatware that slows down even the fastest PCs.

Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop Per Child charity and co-founder of the MIT Media Laboratory, told LinuxWorld on Tuesday we have reached a point where each new release of software is successively worse than the one before it.

“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 ever had in my life,” Negroponte said.

“People aren’t thinking about small, fast, thin systems. Suddenly it’s like a very fat person [who] uses most of the energy to move the fat. And Linux is no exception. Linux has gotten fat, too.”

Negroponte blamed vendors for adding too many features to the software without thinking about the impact they would have on a PCs’ performance.

Full story: The Register