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Due in part to an Intel saleswoman's ill-willed attempt to convince Peru's vice minister of education to ditch a 270,000 OLPC order in favor of Classmates, the relationship between OLPC and Intel suffered an irreparable last blow, and Intel has officially pulled out of OLPC efforts completely. The Intel XO prototype will no longer be shown at CES this week.
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.
...Until Intel surprised him by quitting on Thursday, Mr. Negroponte said he had still held out some hope that the relationship could be saved. The Intel XO was supposed to be introduced next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in keynote speeches to be made by Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Otellini, but the prototype will now be set aside.
photo : Martin Mejia/Associated Press
thanks ian!
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Comments
OLPC will be made available commercially. I suspect others will be dropping out also. The old switch'eroo. Profitability is very tempting even for the altruistic, and that might be ok, but you can't limit others that have made huge contributions with non-compete scenarios.
Haha Isabel "Lama" in Peru!
Intel must've been completely out of their minds. What were they smoking?
This has been brewing for a long time. Intel had the chance to get their chips in the OLPC but they laughed at the project and AMD took advantage of the opportunity. Intel only joined up with OLPC so they could prevent OLPC from marketing their device as an Intel competitor in Asia and they would stop getting bad press for trying to snipe a non-profit. Their aim all along was to sabotage the project and sell cheap Wintel PCs behind OLPC's back to the very people Negroponte is trying to reach (OLPC lost two major contracts to Intel after Intel joined up with OLPC).
Negroponte's biggest mistake in this endeavor was believing (naively) that Intel wouldn't try to publicly undermine the efforts of a non-profit organization. They've done so very effectively and with frighteningly little bad PR. Now he has to sell XOs commercially to keep production numbers up or the price per unit will skyrocket. It's not profit that's driving Negroponte, it's the will to survive and beat Intel with dignity. I wish him luck, but it looks like Intel's dirty tactics (stabbing business partners in the back) just might pay off.