Citing disagreements with the organization, Intel Corp. said Thursday it has abandoned the One Laptop Per Child program, dealing a big blow to the ambitious project seeking to bring millions of low-cost laptops to children in developing countries.
The fallout…comes only a few days before the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where a prototype of an OLPC-designed laptop using an Intel chip was slated to debut.
Intel decided to quit the nonprofit project and the OLPC board because the two reached a “philosophical impasse,” Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said. Meanwhile, Intel will continue with its own inexpensive laptop design called the Classmate, which it is marketing in some of the same emerging markets OLPC has targeted.
Both sides shared the objective of providing children around the world with the use of new technology, “but OLPC had asked Intel to end our support for non-OLPC platforms, including the Classmate PC, and to focus on the OLPC platform exclusively,” Mulloy said. “At the end of the day, we decided we couldn’t accommodate that request.”
Is Intel being unreasonable?
BTW – Mulloy said the Intel version is scrapped.
It’s not like Intel is the only processor company around.
They should have demanded UN and US government funding for the project.
Like Kansas farmers.
I’d put less trust in what Intel is citing as a main reason… I see much bigger MS beast lurking in the background of this story and the likely reason for Intel quitting to be their inability to Win OLPC people to step away from the Linux. The only reason to keep Classmate PC is a Windows-bundle… I believe that the OLPC wanted Classmate abandoned for much more reasonable reason: why would Intel compete with itself doing both?
This is a story of two Goliaths (Intel and MS) monopolizing and killing the better product vs. non-cutthroat business of OLPC offering the Intel and AMD equal share in the project. Ie. being naive.
Or Bush’s Praetorian Guard in Iraq.
The XO did what everyone thought it would do – proved that there was a big market for such a machine. Now Intel will try to exploit that market to the max, and drop OLPC over the side without a second thought.
I’m guessing they read John’s column.
intel has their own low cost pc. they only joined the project for the good press. i was just waiting for this to happen.
There is no reason what so ever why there should not be multiple cheap laptop choices for the needy.
Negroponte can stick his OLPC up his ass if he wanted his version as the only one to be available.
Gary, as per your usual – spot on.
Intel certainly thought their public image, being what it is (and for good reason), could stand some polishing, and no doubt some more-bottom-line-friendly incentives – tax breaks, reimbursements, whatever – were involved as well.
But when the OLPC lot suggested that the world’s poor and disadvantaged were a less-than-appropriate target for Intel’s eye toward profit-über-alles, that’s when their true colors came to the fore.
I’m shocked. Shocked I tell you!
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pedro, pedro, pedro. It’s the OLPC who wants a monopoly, huh? Pretty humorous, considering that ‘monopoly wannabe’ would be Intel’s middle name, if they had one. I’m hard-pressed to think of any other company – besides M$, of course – that has tried so hard, for so long, in so many ways fair and (particularly) foul, to totally monopolize their market.
It’s time to change your meds again, amigo.
Maybe that Negroponte guy wants one of those Nobel prizes all for himself.
Now they can get Russian microprocessors for their reactors!
Gee, Say your going to help, then deadlock those you say you want to help, then speak about starting one of your own and killing at a week later? Sounds like Intel is getting their philosophies from Ford and how they treat green cars.
I can imagine a starving child in Africa getting their laptop with this screen saver. Just looking at those oversized milk jugs would make the mouth water. Little would they know that those glands are fallow. As empty as the promise of a better life that a laptop would bring. I say real hooters for the hordes! I say, “A breast for every mouth!”.
#17 Pedro, when a corporation seeks a monopoly, it is in furtherance of their primary profit motive, and I don’t see how you can even begin to compare a monopoly by a non-profit entity like OLPC to that of corporate enterprise. Some monopolies can be beneficial, such as the local power company, where regulations can control their pure-profit motive while still letting certain other advantages of a monopoly accrue to the benefit of everyone involved.
As I mentioned earlier, cost-reducing economy of scale is a major benefit of a monopoly, and when the profit motive has been removed, as with OLPC, that economy of scale can go directly toward lowering the cost of the child’s laptop computer. I heard that’s important in the third world.
In any case, this was clearly an issue where Intel refused to stop undermining the efforts of OLPC. “Stop competing with us or get off our board” was a perfectly reasonable request, and Intel did what was in their corporate interests — they dissolved the relationship.
Not every good or service is best provided to its end user through the framework of for-profit capitalism, and it will be up to Intel to prove they can produce a superior product with as low a price tag. So far, they haven’t done that.
Of course, I reserve the right to curse everyone involved with this project when I get my first spam-scam from a kid using a OLPC computer 😉
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P.S. to 3-H-C: I see you trademarked your handle. Now, if only you could trademark your writing style…
#20 – Ok Amigo, you got it. “A breast for every mouth except Pedro. He get’s two!”, because he’s special.
I see a conflict of interest here with Intel developing it’s own Laptop. So I can see why they dropped out.Since Microsoft has said it’s working on a downsized XP for a laptop such as OLTPC. It’s very possible they will work on this with Intel.Im sorry but this ideal of giving people laptops when some of these people don’t have running water or proper sanitation is beyond me? Am I missing something here? Where are our priorities? When we put Laptop’s before living civilized?
#6 said it all. This is about Intel sticking with Microsoft, and Microsoft being unwilling to concede the developing world to Linux. There’s an enormous amount of money to be made from burdening these “classroom” machines with even stripped-down versions of Microsoft products.
Sure they’ll run. And school administrators in Peru and Nigeria will install them (over a weekend I suppose) on the 1 million PCs they just received with Microsoft’s marvelous products pre-installed, and in some sense pre-paid.
Intel wants to kill the OLPC so they can sell half as many low end laptops at three times as much.
PJ over at Groklaw got hers as a gift over a dinner out, and they had people lined up all around the table, trying to take a look. She let some little kid play with it a bit, and it sounds like the kid was grinning to hard to say anything.
There’s a lot of silent interest in that laptop.
Good riddance. Is OLPC about children or about control? I think they’ve convinced themselves that they are the superior technology and if Intel or anyone else wants to create really low cost laptop computers then they better make an XO or suffer the consequences.
It is inevitable that a product is created for this price point, why does it HAVE to be an XO?
Dont ever let the term nonprofit misguide you as to think that those in charge arent in it to line their pockets. I have a non profit and have been offered large sums to sell it to some very shady characters who can not get one( it is very hard to get a 403c now ) but know how much money you can suck out of one if your unscrupulous.
#31, LOL, exactly. Set the corporation up right and it can make one heck of a profit and pay the officers outragious salaries and benifits. But it’s “not for profit” because there are no stock holders.
I did not know there was any restriction as to who could control it, though. When did that come about?
The woman on the screen really says it all. Worldwide whites are a minority at what 10% of the population. Now all these brown and black children will have access to porn made by Jews with naked defiled white women. While whites buy one give one. Its not wise to educate our competitors. See the movie Brothers Solomon watch some ignorant alien beast impregnate and defile a white woman. I am so distraught after watching this Jew filth.
#33. I don’t mind if you’re offended by porn, but please keep the Antisemitism out of this forum.
WOW! Sam (#33) may be proposing some sort of “final solution”… shameful…
I Think the best part of the whole OLPC project is the least discussed. The XO hardware is not that impressive but the OS rocks! I’m a musician and I love tweaking with TamTam (from live CD)! I wonder if Intel wanted a slice of that Linux pie and was denied.
Whatever the people behind the OLPC may or may not be doesn’t mean Jack Shit to me, since the organization they are opposing is one of human civilizations greatest poster children for rampant, shameless, arrogantly defiant, amoral and unethical greed, with possibly only one serious competitor.
If anyone wants to seriously suggest that the brazen, infamous moneygrubbing monopolists at Intel could possibly have the moral high ground in this dispute, please contact me for real estate investment opportunities. I am also Marie of Roumania.
>> Is Intel being unreasonable?
I suppose it depends on how much money Intel is making from the OLPC deal. If it is a break-even for them, it unreasonable that they should be banned from profit elsewhere.
Seems to me that OPLC — as a non profit group — should not be too pushy about how Intel makes their money. I’ve worked for non-profits most of my adult life and it would never occur to me that we could tell businesses what to do with their for-profit customers.