p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- “Nicholas Negroponte had a vision: to build a $100 laptop and give away millions to educate the world’s poorest children. And then the fat-cat multinationals got scared and broke it …”

That’s the lead-in to Bryan Appleyard’s Times Online article to something everyone who believes in online freedom and openness already knew.

The truth, he states unequivocally, is, “the two mightiest high-tech companies in the world looked on Negroponte’s philanthropic scheme and decided it had to die”.

He goes on »»»

Yet, 3½ years later, the laptop is clinging on to life. It costs around $190 rather than $100 and it is called the XO. It is no longer like a tent, but it can still be solar-powered. It is a technological triumph. But only 370,000 are in use and another 250,000 ordered. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the company formed to run the project, is still driven by the same old idealism, geekery and technical brilliance. But Negroponte and his young staff are older and wiser. They were stunned by the savagery of the competition they faced – competition plainly intended to destroy a philanthropic idea. “I had wildly underestimated,” says Negroponte, “the degree to which commercial entities will go to disrupt a humanitarian project.”

Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Intel’s Craig Barrett both trashed the XO, as the OLPC laptop is known today.

“The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk … and with a tiny little screen,” said Microsoft philanthropist Gates.

And, “I think a more realistic title should be ‘the $100 gadget’,” said Barrett.

“Wouldn’t it be great if Intel decided to get behind MIT’s One Laptop Per Child project, created to bring children in Africa into the 21st digital century?” - p2pnet posted, also saying,

Instead, “Intel is competing against it with a hardcore commercial unit purpose-designed to funnel corporate product into the homes of African families many, if not most, of whom are surviving at subsistence level, or below.”

Then Intel, recognizing it was courting a PR disaster by trying to force its commercial Classmate PC down the throats of the world’s needy in competition with the OLPC laptop, bit the bullet, p2pnet said, and went on »»»

“Intel has apparently had a change of heart, and we welcome them to the table,” venunet.com has an AMD spokesperson stating.

And, “The thing we have been highlighting is that both parties are working towards the same goal,” story has a Chipzilla spokesperson saying.

Meanwhile, “ntel and One Laptop per Child (OLPC) today announced they have agreed to work together to bring the benefits of technology to the developing world through synergy of their respective programs,’ says Intel in a statement.

“Under the agreement, Intel and OLPC will explore collaborations involving technology and educational content. Intel will also join the board of OLPC.”

OLPC aims to, “bring learning opportunities to the most remote and poorest children of the world by providing connected, low-cost and rugged laptops to each and every child in their daily lives,” says Intel as it hastily climbs onto OLPC’s coat-tails, hoping to generate side-benefit for Classmate.

“Joining OLPC is a further example of our commitment to education over the last 20 years and our belief in the role of technology in bringing the opportunities of the 21st century to children around the world,” says Chipzilla ceo Paul Otellini unblushingly.

As for Microsoft, in another story, “Microsoft is to begin field tests of Windows XP working on the so-called $100 laptop, or XO, early in 2008,” p2pnet quoted the BBC as saying.

But, “It has not committed to offering XP on the XO laptop but hopes to release the operating system in the first half of 2008 if the trials succeed.”

We continued:

“Hasn’t committed? Ha! You can bet your nether regions Bill and the Boyz would kill to somehow get their system on the OLPC laptops.

“How else would they get all those new computer users in all those lovely developing countries addicted to MS crud?”

And Barrett’s scorn notwithstanding, “Intel and OLPC will explore collaborations involving technology and educational content,” he said last year, and, “Intel will also join the board of OLPC.”

Then in May this year,”The people running the One Laptop Per Child project, struggling for acceptance and viability since the beginning, have caved in to the blandishments of Bill and the Boyz,” p2pnet posted.

“XO has been polluted with the Windows Blue Screen of Death.

“Or as the Boston Globe sums it up nicely, ‘Laptops for poor to run Windows XP,’ with all that implies.”

Back to Appleyard in Times Online who states »»»

 Microsoft may have used words and a refusal to co-operate as its weapons against the XO; Intel used brute force. The company dominates global computer hardware in the way that Microsoft dominates the software. And, like Microsoft, it is a fierce protector of its ascendancy. So fierce, in fact, that the Federal Trade Commission in the US has recently opened an investigation into its alleged anti-competitive practices designed to shut out AMD. On the academic side of the OLPC project, they were shocked by the ferocity with which Intel attempted to kill their product. On the business side, they just shrugged and they all said the same thing: “It’s in their DNA.”

Intel’s response to the XO was the Classmate. It is nothing like as radical a machine in that it is, basically, a straightforward Windows laptop. Intel will tie itself in knots rather than admit its laptop was a response to OLPC’s.

My Intel spokesperson, Agnes Kwan, seems to exist to evade the issue. I played e-mail ping-pong with her over several days. She was trying to avoid giving me any dates that would show the Classmate came after the XO. This included sending me a bizarre and barely literate “ethnographic” study of computing in the developed world. In the end, all she would say about the timeline of the Classmate was: “It’s hard to pinpoint a start date with the nature of ethnographic research in which ethnographers collect data over a long period of time.” Sorry?

Many in the industry says the Classmate was intended to be an XO killer and that’s how Intel behaved. Their formidable global sales operation charged into any market in which OLPC might get a foothold, trashing the XO and pushing the Classmate. Nigeria, where Negroponte had one of his handshake deals with President Obasanjo, was a typical example. In August 2006, Craig Barrett, Intel chairman, wrote a hard-sell letter to Obasanjo asking for a meeting in which he could explain their World Ahead programme, “which is chartered to extend PC access to the world’s next billion users”. This programme had been launched in May 2006, 15 months after the OLPC announcement at Davos – bit of a dead giveaway there, Craig. Barrett’s letter was backed up by documents listing “the shortcoming of the OLPC approach”.

These documents having been leaked, they became a significant embarrassment to Intel. Here was a mighty company trying to crush a philanthropic project. In May last year they seemed ready for a truce and a deal was done. Intel would join the OLPC board, invest $6m in the company, there would be moves to put an Intel chip in the XO, and there would be no more slagging off of the XO in the marketplace. The deal failed with almost Middle Eastern speed and finality. Intel attended only one board meeting and Intel salesmen — “it’s in their DNA” –carried on slagging off the XO. Intel also tried to parcel up the world into easy markets for Intel and hard ones for OLPC.

“You mean,” says Negroponte of this phase, “Ethiopia is mine and Mongolia isn’t?

At the same time, Negroponte was demanding Intel stop marketing the Classmate. Intel refused on the basis that there was room for a plurality of solutions to the “digital divide”. On this issue — says Agnes — the deal collapsed and Intel left the board in January. Even the departure was contentious. Negroponte said there was a deal to say nothing until there could be a joint announcement. But, of course, Intel went ahead and spoke to the press anyway.

“It’s quite obvious,” says an OLPC spokesman, “that they waited until very late in the day to make it nearly impossible for OLPC representatives on the East Coast to get their side of the story in the ‘first stories’.” Bruce Sewell of Intel e-mailed Negroponte to apologise, saying “instructions were misunderstood internally”.

I put all this to dear Agnes. No comment.

But, “Destructive as all this sounds, it represents a kind of success for OLPC,” says Times Online, adding:

“First, whatever Intel tries not to say, it is almost certain that the OLPC inspired the Classmate and cheap computers from others. Furthermore, as many on the business side of OLPC pointed out, the very fact that giants like Microsoft and Intel were bothering to trash the XO indicated the power of this idea to get under their skin. “If Nicholas hadn’t said what he said in January ‘05,” says Dan Shine at AMD in Austin, Texas, “this machine wouldn’t be here and a lot of other technologies and discussions wouldn’t be here. He accelerated people getting access by probably years.”

“And, finally, however ‘impure’ it may be to the open sourcers, putting Windows on the XO was a huge breakthrough in the computing industry because Microsoft has let them have Windows XP for $3 per computer. One of the previous industry certainties was that Microsoft never ever sells anything cheap.

Meanwhile, Appleyard concludes:

“Computers are like drugs, literally. If the drug companies wanted to do the most good in the world, they would divert all investment from the illnesses of the rich — cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes — to the much more catastrophic ailments of the poor, primarily malaria, but also Aids. But they don’t; they sit comfortably on their high-margin drugs. Equally, if the technocrats really believed in the human value of universal connectivity — and all of them say they do — they would find ways of wiring southeast Asia and Africa. But they don’t; they sit comfortably on their high-margin laptops.

“Or they did until Nick Negroponte, supreme prophet of digital connectivity, revealed a strange, tent-like object in January 2005 at the World Economic Forum in Davos and, at a stroke, gave Agnes her job description.”

. .Stumble It!

Times Online - Why Microsoft and Intel tried to kill the XO $100 laptop, August 10, 2008
p2pnet - Intel’s OLPC change of heart, July 17, 2008
another story - Microsoft threatens XP for OLPC laptops, December 6, 2007
BBC - Microsoft trials XP on XO laptop, December 6, 2007
p2pnet - OLPC XO gets Windowed, May 16, 2008
Boston Globe - Laptops for poor to run Windows XP, May 16, 2008

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 8:44 am and is filed under Freedom, Product News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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