Intel, Microsoft Despised the XO Laptop

gregsim writes "The Wall Street Journal today reports that the new XO laptop, centerpiece of the One Laptop Per Child project, is stimulating an active response from both Intel and Microsoft. The companies evidently feel threatened by the little upstart, intended to help third-world children. (The XO runs Linux and uses AMD chips.) Microsoft has cut their software to $3 each and Intel has designed their own laptop called the Classmate to sell between $230 and $300, nearly double the XO's price. Rather than defend the relative merits of his creation, professor Negroponte is crying foul and (if the article is to be believed) not even arguing the technical merits. The initial demand for the XO has fallen well below Mr. Negroponte's projections as Intel and Microsoft have successfully argued that their entries are superior. 45,000 have been ordered through the Give One, Get One campaign. I am happy that I ordered mine — it will be a landmark model in any case."

$230 not 'double' the price

[Anonymous Coward]

The XO is selling for $199. $230 is hardly 'double' the price.

Re:Competition is good

[chuckymonkey]

Ummmm, the kids don't really have a choice about which one they get. They are ordered by the kids' respective governments. The other problem with the Wintel offering is that it's not environmentally hardened like the XO. For a kid in a mud hut having a computer that can take intense amounts of punishment is very important. Another thing I don't like about Wintel interfering is that it really isn't geared towards learning, they're worried about a bunch of kids learning something other than M$ software and intel Hardware. The XO is pretty much agnostic when it comes to software and hardware, they're going for cheap durable and good for learning which they have with the current setup. Now if Wintel were worried about the kids not getting something important to education and took steps to mitigate that lack then I don't see anything wrong with them getting involved, but really all they're worried about are future profit margins.

Double the cost of the XO? Huh?

[SuperBanana]

Intel has designed their own laptop called the Classmate to sell between $230 and $300, nearly double the XO's price

What? The XO was targeted to cost $100. It ballooned out to $130, then $175, then $188, then $200 [eweek.com].

Now, if you want to donate 10,000 of them, you get that $200 price. If you want to donate 100 or less, you pay $300 per laptop. [laptopfoundation.org]

Why they have a sliding price scale is beyond me...they're supposed to be a non-profit, building the things for the poorest people in the world, and yet...the fewer you buy, the more you pay...

Re:Negroponte's Dumb Idea

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The thing is, Negroponte's $100 laptop suffers from the same flaw as Ford's Model T ultimately did. A used computer will probably give you more capability than a cheap new one. I think for $150, you could buy a notebook that's better than this "everyman's computer", and while you were at it, you could probably buy a used generator.

The cheapest I can find a hand powered generator capable of powering a laptop, even used, is about $60. The cheapest I can find used laptops online is about $200. How much value there in the tailored OS, preloaded with software and reference material and preconfigured to be ideal in the conditions of the third world?

I think you're very mistaken. Getting a good laptop that will work well for children in these situations, with questionable access to electricity is a lot harder than you seem to imply. And even if you do, it probably will still fail to meet the second half of the criteria, which is to say it is all free and easily editable/customizable without any lock-in to a particular vendor. The first world has undercut the agricultural sector in much of the third world and catching them up with agricultural equipment and fertilizer production would cost a huge amount. Providing them with the foundation to enter into the intellectual property industry, including custom software. This is a chance for them to develop a sustainable industry and income and offer their services to the world.

Re:$230 not 'double' the price

[ravenlock]

Nope, $399 buys you one and another for a kid, $200 of it is tax-deductible.

Why there is an OLPC

[kriston]

I'm waiting for my XOPC which I ordered at 6:05 AM on day 1 of the Give-One-Get-One program.

The reason for this machine and its unique interface, power saving, and wireless connection is for empowering people who do not have computing expertise, reliable power, or even telephone connections.

An important use for the machine that is overlooked is to provide textbooks to children in areas which simply don't have textbooks.
The laptop has an important reflective screen for e-book reading.
Imagine having all your courseware on one machine that you transmit to them wirelessly?
Furthermore, Worldspace at www.worldspace.com has committed to using part of its satellite radio bandwidth to transmit courseware to areas like Africa, India, and Asia.

The free sharing of textbooks and courseware are far and away the most important aspects of this laptop.

Have you ever taken a class for which the textbooks were on back-order? These children deal with that every school day. The copier is always broken, there is never any paper or toner, and this laptop helps to solve all these problems.

Re:Negroponte's Dumb Idea

[Rob Simpson]

Keep in mind that you'd also want a rugged laptop, so make that a used Toughbook. And even the most energy-efficient laptop would probably use at least ten times as much electricity as this. You'd either have to charge it for ten times as long before use, or continually generate power while using it.

Re:Double the cost of the XO? Huh?

[tgd]

Or you can buy one, donate one for $400 and donate the second one as well. Two donated, $200 a piece, $400 tax deduction and you still get a year of T-Mobile internet access.

Three Intel MYTHs Busted Here

[Glasswire]

1) MYTH: MSFT and Intel constitute the evil Wintel cartel. Fact: MSFT doesn't like Intel's Classmate PC - read the Wikipedia article on it [wikipedia.org] and you'll notice that there are 3 supported OS (Mandriva Linux, Metasys 2.0, Windows XP). XP is poorly suited to the Classmate and some form of Linux would likely be the OS
2) MYTH: Intel hates OLPC. Intel is PART of the OLPC project (since summer 2007) - Microsoft is NOT. (The original poster doesn't even mention this) Perhaps this would imply that next gen XO unit will be Intel-based ( see this post [slashdot.org] for more on why )
3) MYTH: AMD Geode is superior technology. FACT: It's very lightweight, low power technology that AMD bought from National Semiconductor. It's not based on current technology. Intel is developing a whole generation of much lower power, but much faster processors - due partially to the magic of 45nm- in the Silverthorn cpus. coming in 2008. What's interesting about them is not so much the technical specs, but that the process technology lets the dies be so small that Intel will be able to put thousands of processors on a single wafer [tgdaily.com] allowing Intel to make them very cheap and still get good margins for them. The whole target market for these cpus is phone/handhelds/MIDs and very basic systems that need x86 instruction set with sub-one-watt power consumption (and good performance). It is exactly what XO v2 should be built on.

Re:Competition is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, thing is, in 3rd world developing countries, many children don't have this fancy thing called electricity, and what's worse, many people don't even know how to read. In Africa especially, the air is dry, which leads to small particles entering the laptop. The classmate PC isn't designed to be anything more than a cheap regular laptop, and most certainly isn't designed for these conditions.

By contrast, the XO laptop isn't dependent on a powergrid. The interface is developed so that you *don't have to know how to read* in order to use it (Administer it, yes, but not in order to use it. Windows falls flat here), and what's even better is that it's designed for rough usage. Not to mention that the XO laptop is designed to *be an education tool*, while the classmate PC just happens to be a Laptop with Windows thrown onto it.

So, the XO laptop is clearly technicly superior for the intended market. But, marketing and other stuff can still make it fail. I'm hoping it won't though.

Re:the nature of the competitive threat

[bbbl67]

Do you think Intel joined the project (MSFT did NOT) just to help AMD integrate the XO v2? Geode is a dead end.

I know about Silverthorne, but it looks like it isn't good enough to join XO just yet, either. The AMD Geode still has the substantial advantage of being both CPU and a chipset in the same package. So all of the power calculations are based on a single chip, so a 1.1W Geode is altogether a 1.1W product. A Silverthorne even if it is 1.0W vs. Geode's 1.1W, is going to have a substantial hit in power consumption once you add its external chipset in. Even if they can get the chipset down to the exact same power consumption as the Silverthorne processor (highly doubtful), you would then have a 1.0W CPU + 1.0W chipset = 2.0W package. Then there's the additional problem that having two chips to deal with, will substantially complicate the circuit board layout. For this reason Intel announced that they are now working a totally new processor architecture, which will be separate from Silverthorne. They haven't released too much info about it yet, but my feeling is that it's going to be an integrated solution just like Geode. Don't expect that to be out till 2009.

Re:Competition is good

[Antique Geekmeister]

There are other big issues. The OLPC boots in seconds, and is extremely efficient in terms of power, and massively avoids all the gewgaws Microsoft mandates as "features" for its software. This is deadly to new markets for them, so Microsoft and Intel are engaging in a normally illegal practice called "dumping". This is using the money from your more profitable markets to sell your goods, below cost, to drive a competitor without such deep pockets out of the business.

The practice is most easily done by a monopoly to prevent competitors from entering the market. We see it extensively in the diamond market, we see it by Microsoft in China to block Linux releases, and we've seen it in new markets by Intel. So there's no surprise here.

Re:Competition is good

[MadAhab]

I checked this thread just to see who made the "dumping" argument.

According to the article I read, Microsoft has been dumping Windows+Office at $3 into these markets to stunt the OPLC market share. That's dumping by any definition.

The worst was reading some guy from Libya saying they opted for Intel/MS vs OPLC because they didn't want to be a dumping ground for OPLC. Wait 10 years, let MS get their hooks in, then as soon as the competition is gone, no more $3 windows. This is how the developed world always rooks the undeveloped world. The 419ers are just a tiny bit of poetic justice by comparison - it turns out the nuclear weapon Microsoft holds is the same psychology that fuels Ponzi schemes. Just afraid to be left out of the "success" everyone else APPEARS to be having.

Sad, really, that this one official will sell his whole country out to loan sharks because he's scared of not looking like a cool kid ("no one ever got fired for buying IBM!"). Well, that and probably some well-placed bribes.

It doesnt matter if XO is a big hit or not

[voss]

Asus is already coming out with the EEE pc, so intel will have to keep making classmates.

There is a market in the US for $200 laptops, in classrooms if nothing else.
The ability to have a laptop cart with 20 laptops for under 5k instead of the normal $25000
is a disruptive technology.

If XO does nothing else but bring down the cost of laptops for people around the world..then
Mr. Negroponte deserves our gratitude.

Knowledge != IQ

[raftpeople]

If someone doesn't know why a contaminated water supply is a problem, that does not mean they have low intelligence, it means they do not have the knowledge surrounding bacteria, etc.

Here is a definition of intelligence, as you can see it applies more to potential than an already accumulated set of data:

Intelligence is defined as general cognitive problem-solving skills. A mental ability involved in reasoning, perceiving relationships and analogies, calculating, learning quickly... etc.

Whether the laptop program ends up being beneficial in the big picture is unclear, but it's a digital age and I think it makes sense to get the kids interested/comfortable with technology because it will encroach on their lives eventually. Additionally, there could be someone with a mind like Srinivasa Ramanujan sitting in a village that could get real value out of this, you never know.