14 DAY TRIAL // The non-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project has started as a personal initiative of Professor Nicholas Negroponte and his team. The finality was to deliver affordable technology to the third world countries and, thus, to bridge the technology division between wealthy nations and the undeveloped countries. The plan was to devise a laptop cheap enough to be made available through charity. Negroponte's organization has set a goal of 150 million units to be delivered by the end of 2008.
They are highly likely to have succeeded, but the human factor is, as usual, very powerful and extremely unpredictable. Companies that live for profit have been threatened by the idea of having a laptop (XO) for the "ridiculous" $100 fee and threw Negroponte's project in a vortex of corporate politics. The XO laptops have now to face aggressive competition from extremely popular brands, such as Microsoft and Intel.
Negroponte's laptops have been perceived as a threat to the computer industry, as the MIT team that built them managed to do without Intel chips and Windows operating systems. Instead of these, they implemented the much cheaper AMD solution and Linux as an Open Source operating system.
It's hard to say what Intel's reaction was when they were cut out of business, but they definitely decided to punish such an initiative and they actually did. Intel has never been "the computer builder", but they decided that there's time to introduce a cheap laptop, the Classmate, that addresses (guess who?) the developing countries. The problem is that the selling price goes easily above $ 230. Even so, the Intel product is aggressively marketed against Negroponte's creation. The campaign has little chances of becoming a gold mine; its mission is to ram the AMD competition off-road and prevent them from becoming a standard in the developing world.
Intel has already sabotaged the OLPC market by contracting hundreds of thousands Classmate units in countries as Nigeria, Libya and Pakistan - the original markets for Negroponte's laptops. Moreover, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft would give a discounted $3 package, including Windows, Microsoft XP student edition and other educational software, which also was meant to sabotage Negroponte's XO laptop.
It was meant to be the other way around: industry giants should have been shaking hands and work together for the benefit of hundreds of millions of children - their possible future targeted market. Instead, they have made out of poverty another battlefield in search for profit. As for the children, the future of Negroponte's laptop is still uncertain. We will witness next year the finality of this charity project.