Money talks?
At the Consumer Electronic Show this week, the One Laptop Per Child foundation was supposed to make two announcements—the number of computers it sold under the Give One, Get One holiday program and a new olpc machine made jointly with Intel. But now Intel has pulled out or been pushed out of the project with olpc, depending on who you believe. It’s a mess and a mess of huge dimensions that encompasses a conversation of profit vs. nonprofit, nationalism vs. colonialism, technology vs. pedagogy, rote vs. experiential learning, Western design vs. Eastern design, good intentions vs. bad intentions. It doesn’t get bigger, or nastier.Nicholas Negroponte, the ex-head of the MIT Media Lab and founder of the olpc project, frames the current mess in terms of profit vs. non-profit. He says Intel has been sabotaging olpc in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to sell its own low-cost ClassMate laptop to these markets. The olpc laptop uses an AMD chip, is Linux open source and therefor threatens Intel's commercial success in emerging markets, Negroponte argues.
Source: businessweek.com via pgaliba
After several years of publicly attacking the XO, Intel reversed itself over the summer and joined the organization’s board, agreeing to make an $18 million contribution and begin developing an Intel-based version of the computer.
Although Intel made an initial $6 million payment to One Laptop, the partnership was troubled from the outset as Intel sales representatives in the field competed actively against the $200 One Laptop machine by trying to sell a rival computer, a more costly Classmate PC.The Classmate sells for about $350 with an installed version of Microsoft Office, and Intel is selling the machine through an array of sales organizations outside the United States.
Even after Intel joined the One Laptop board, in country after country, the two organizations competed to make government sales, Mr. Negroponte said yesterday in a telephone interview. The relationship first frayed seriously in October, he said, when an Intel salesman gave a Mongolian government official a side-by-side comparison of the Classmate PC and the XO.
Source: nytimes.com via pgaliba
Tags: Africa | America | Asia | China | India | India | AMD | Consumer electronic show | Foundation | intel | Laptop | Linux | Nicholas Negroponte | OLPC | One laptop per child | Technology
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