Intel vs. Negroponte: Debating Implementation Of The One Laptop Per Child Project

In case you missed it, I’d suggest taking a look at the 60 Minutes segment from Sunday night in which Lesley Stahl interviews MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte on his One Laptop Per Child project, in which he has spearheaded an effort to create an innovative, extremely low-cost, highly durable laptop for children in developing countries.

The story examines Negroponte’s allegation that Intel (INTC) has been “shameless” in trying to kill the project with its own low-cost laptop, called the Intel Classmate.

Negroponte asserts that Intel is unhappy that the OLPC device uses processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). In the segment, Intel Chairman Craig Barrett derides that ideas that Negroponte can single-handedly get cheap computers into the hands of the world’s children. “It will take the whole industry to do this,” he said.

It’s a fascinating piece. Barrett is set up to be the bully, the big bad capitalist coming in to wreck Negroponte’s idealist dream of a laptop on every lap. Negroponte, the piece stresses, is leading a non-profit venture, with nothing to personally gain from this (aside from glory and appearances on 60 Minutes). I certainly admire Negorponte’s vision on this, but I think Barrett’s view is more practical: the profit-motive is a powerful incentive to get devices into the hands of even the poorest kids in the most disadvantaged places.

Think about what has been happening lately in the cell phone business: handset makers are scrambling to produce low cost models to sell in the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - and other developing economies. Nokia (NOK), for instance, has changed the way it develops and builds cell phones to zero in on the market for low-cost devices.

Negroponte’s efforts have provided some fascinating evidence of the value of wide-spread access to computing technology, but it seems to me that to really get computers into the hands of 1 billion school-age children is going to require some help from the market.

Intel certainly sees a market of 1 billion laptops to be attractive; if it can figure out a way to serve that market more effectively than Negroponte’s grass-roots effort, I can’t see why that is necessarily a bad thing.

Comments

[huangjin:]

Negroponte is out to lunch, I can't believe he accused Intel of dumping. He sounds just like a protectionist. The point is to get laptops into the hands of poor kids, and that's what's happening.

2007 May 23 02:28 PM

[Charbax:]

Intel does not like the idea at all of cheap laptops, that's the whole point.

Intel and Microsoft's whole business plan is to keep prices of computers and software high, that's how they make huge profits for each PC that is sold, and so do the resellers, thus resellers also prefer Intel and Microsoft's business plan.

What OLPC is doing is to discard all marketing and distribution costs, open up the software with Linux, optimize the software OS to work on cheapest possible hardware available today, this OLPC XO-1 computer has got nothing at all to do with the Intel Classmate computer. Intel's "low cost" computer is nothing else than a normal laptop, made smaller so it looks like the OLPC XO-1, uses a conventionnal expoensive 7" LCD screen, nothing revolutionary about power managment since the Intel Classmate needs a cooler, has a normal laptop battery life of about 2 hours with heavy use. The only effort Intel did was to use a 2GB flash memory instead of a 20GB hard disk drive, which only takes down the price with about 30$ and only slightly reduces the power consumption.

OLPC XO-1 on the other hand turns off the main AMD Geode processor 99% of the time when users are using applications where the processor is not needed, that is a revolution called the DCON chip, reduces power consumption immensely, also the screen of the XO-1 is revolutionary, consume 1/6th of the power of Intel's Classmate LCD in full backlight mode even though XO-1's screen is larger and has a much better resolution, and consumes about 50 times less power than Intel's LCD when in black and white reflective mode, which you should just try and see for yourself, black and white reflective mode is incredibly readable especially for e-books, it's nearly as good as e-paper. OLPC XO-1 has 12 hours battery life when in backlight mode with heavy use, 24 hour battery life in e-book black and white high resolution mode and 6 days battery life in suspended mode with faster than 1-second resume into Linux and with the Wi-Fi Mesh turned on all of those 6 days forwarding packets for the surrounding OLPC XO-1s in use!

The BOM Bill Of Material for the Intel Classmate is closer to $400 than it is of $200. Intel is simply lying about their cost. The way Intel proceeds is they send their lobbyists at the same governments where Nicholas Negroponte has been talking, when Intel says is they shouldn't buy a million laptops with Negroponte at $176 each, they should buy 10 thousand units from Intel at $180 each. What Intel is suggesting is that the countries shouldn't mass produce any low cost laptop, they should first spend a few years testing those crappy Intel ones to see if low cost laptops are of any use for the children in developping countries. Since Intel ones are so crappy, Intel's Classmate project will thus fail and Intel and Microsoft can continue basing their whole business model and income through expensive, bloated, steaming power consuming, uselessly powerfull for 95% of consumers use which is just using a Browser, a few videos, music and word processing.

Basically Intel is not doing fair competition, what they are doing is dumping the price of their crappy laptop, trying to convince governments not to order large amounts (which would cost Intel too much if the price is dumped), basically Intel is desperate to stop whatever computing revolution that OLPC XO-1 will initiate once more than 3 million units will be deployed all over the world starting in September.

2007 May 24 01:05 AM

[Sr. Pessimist:]

Well, governments are easy to sell to. They'll take money over a lot of things.

My belief for the corporate initiatives of OLPC-style laptops and cell phones is to uncover the highlights of the global talent pool. Good engineers are born, not made. The big companies are desperate to find engineers before anybody else does. Labor is scarce, corporate bull is not.

2007 May 25 03:22 AM