Shame at the core of Intel
A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs.
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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.
No big comments on that one. I find it a shame that Intel can’t limit themselves to do for profit business in the free markets and allow the OLPC consortium to make substantial non-for-profit efforts to improve the education in the third world. I know the cliche, corrupt government officials that will throw public money into the vendors hands (Intel and Microsoft in this case), supposedly in exchange for a cut in the deal... Classic.
When Intel joined the consortium I was guessing they would play fair and push for the school server market in the short term, until they are able to leverage low energy designs enough to be competitive in this area. But I see they are trying to push for the classic strategy of giving them the surplus capacity of the first world markets. I hope Intel was not playing the game of putting lots of money in... to cut it in the hope to cause bankrupcy, another old time classic for financial sharks.
Well, first they ignored the OLPC initiative, after that they laughed at it... now we are seeing the last attempts to fight against it... so the initiative is about to succeed.
Please, stop doing dirty tricks and limit to your share of the new solid state handheld competing for the first world markets, much like Asus is trying to do with the EeePC. You’ll notice fast that this is not about features, but about integrated design and high efficiency computing.
Hackability as a marketing strategy, the XO and Joost
I’m watching a very interesting (very long too) Google Tech Talk, called Python on the OLPC XO Laptop. While watching it I noted that Joost’s and the OLPC’s strategies for mindshare are opposite: Joost develops its client only for th... [more]Trackback from Santiago Gala at