Reuters reports that Intel have backed out of the $100 Laptop project after the company OLPC suggested that Intel not sell their chips to competitive products in Africa and other regions. Reuters says:
Intel Corp said on Thursday it will drop out of the One Laptop Per Child project and resign from the board after the project’s board demanded the chipmaker stop supporting other efforts in emerging markets… The OLPC board “had asked Intel to end its support for non-OLPC platforms including the Classmate PC and other systems,” Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said. “They wanted us to focus our support exclusively on the OLPC system.” Mulloy said Intel decided to drop out after six months of discussion.
Meanwhile, Valleywag points to a joblisting on Craigslist that suggests that OLPC is looking for someone to write their business plan, and comments:
Has anyone ever written a real business plan for this venture? From the results, it wouldn’t seem so.
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Send them to SCORE. They’ll help them write a business plan for free. They need all the help they can get.
January 5th, 2008 at 5:31 am
OLPC as, i my vie, doomed fm the sart, as it us an opeating system (LNUX) whih is not mainstream, thereby not givng it’s users athe real technological skills that thy will need to compete on a level playing field and is it ignoes the fact that the so called basic needs - food, water, shelter, and fuel have to be supplied first in order for the user of the laptop to make he most of it.
January 5th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Looks like things aren’t so cut and dry with Intel. According to the New York Times, “In Peru, where One Laptop has begun shipping the first 40,000 PCs of a 270,000 system order, Isabelle Lama, an Intel saleswoman, tried to persuade Peru’s vice minister of education, Oscar Becerra Tresierra, that the Intel Classmate PC was a better choice for his primary school students.
Unfortunately for Intel, the vice minister is a longtime acquaintance of Mr. Negroponte and Seymour Papert, a member of the One Laptop team and an M.I.T. professor who developed the Logo computer programming language. The education minister took notes on his contacts with the Intel saleswoman and sent them to One Laptop officials.”
January 6th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Intel is just pissed because the OLPC (running on AMD processors) has the potential to school the wintel monopoly. There are far more kids in developing nations that need a laptop that costs less than a years worth of textbooks than cubicle jockeys in the developed world who need to get their outlook fixed so they can go back to surfing for another job. It has never been intended for users of full-featured computers or operating systems, it’s for the next generation of innovators that have yet to start writing code. Look at what India is doing, that’s what OLPC wants to do for the world.
January 8th, 2008 at 7:20 pm