To create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. —OLPC Mission Statement,
Intel joined Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child, OLPC, as one of the board of directors. Their mission was to educate and empower children belonging to the developing world by providing them with cheap laptops. But after a few months, Intel decided to part its ways from the non-profit organization. The plan to contribute both technology and educational content amongst the two organizations was washed away in its entirety.
The One Laptop Per Child, OLPC, is not just any organization. It consisted of such corporate giants in its board of directors as AMD, Brightstar, Chi Lin, eBay, Google, Marvell, Quanta Computer, and others set out with one mission, which was to provide low-cost, rugged laptops to children living in the world’s most remote and poorest countries. With these remarkable brands already building their strong ties with the OLPC organization, Intel proved to be a late comer. From competing with OLPC with its “learning-assistant” Classmate PC, then joining with a full-fledged membership of the OLPC board, and then again leaving the membership in order to compete, is somewhat very confusing and at the same time a remarkable story. If you wish to learn how so may jumps in their collaboration came about then let me unfold this story for you.
Before joining, Intel’s chairman, Craig Barrett, publicly disparaged Negroponte’s OLPC program when it was first announced, saying that Negroponte should call his program’s XO laptop a “$100 gadget,” and not a computer. On the other hand, Negroponte lashed back at Intel in a 60 Minutes interview, saying that the company should be ashamed of itself and was undermining the initiative’s progress by using philanthropy as a shameless and divisive PR tool.
Intel had already started their own program. In this, they were providing classmate PC which is a small, mobile learning assistant and educational solution that Intel specially developed for students in emerging markets. It’s a rugged learning device designed to provide affordable, collaborative learning environments. This classmate PC is directly in competition with the idea of One Laptop Per Child.
What started as an objectionable rivalry cannot be possibly termed as a collaborative effort at any point. Because the base of their disturbance with each other, continued even after they had decided to join in and collaborate. Intel continued to develop its Classmate PC program.
Due to which a hopeful collaborative effort was never materialized, instead their relationship became worse and worse each passing day. Intel, instead of collaborating, violated the written agreements on various occasions.
On one occasion, Intel deliberately ridiculed XO Laptop in nations which had already decided to become a member and a buyer of XO laptop. These countries included Uruguay, Peru, Brazil, Nigeria and Mongolia. A couple of them were in the midst of choosing and were contemplating whether to collaborate with OLPC or not. Intel acted in such a manner, that it could have resulted in loss of customers and partners. Being a member of board of directors, Intel acted in a very unprofessional and uncalled for manner proving the fact that its collaboration was completely forceful.
Its unwillingness for collaboration came right in the forefront one more time when it showed its unwillingness to cooperate with OLPC on software development. Even after being a part of OLPCs empowering efforts, Intel made no attempt to help. Instead, Intel never contributed in any way to our engineering efforts and failed to provide even a single line of code to the XO software efforts – even though Intel marketed its products as being able to run the XO software. The best Intel could offer in regards to an “Intel inside” XO laptop was one that would be more expensive and consume more power – exactly the opposite direction of OLPC’s stated mandate and vision.
OLPC claimed that they viewed children as a mission. While Intel viewed them as a market. Thus it was best that they parted their ways. OLPC made every attempt to collaborate but Intel even on its departure, did not bother informing OLPC. This news reached OLPC through media, while they were planning to work on joint efforts with Intel.
The main reason Intel was becoming nervous about Negroponte’s ambitions, and was threatened by its success. He proved that a relatively inexpensive laptop could be produced, selling for $188 overseas. OLPCs plan included the distribution of 150 million cheap laptops. These laptops were using Advanced Microchip. Intel was threatened and believed that this could eventually lead towards demand of these chips in the developing world.
Not surprisingly in view of the low price, Intel doesn’t make a large profit on its Classmate laptops, but it uses them to protect market share. Negroponte had asked and requested Intel not to market Classmate in the developing countries as it proved to be of great competition for OLPC. But Intel was not able to back out since it had already sold has already sold tens of thousands of its Classmates oversees and discontinuing this program would disrupt relations with overseas manufacturers and supplies. On the other hand, OLPC had tried to cover its own inadequacies in market by selling the laptop in American market, which again posed a great threat to Intel’s market in America.
Thus the ongoing tug of war between the two organizations has left the organizations competing with each other in the name of non-profit collaborative efforts. Thus, charity asks for leaving all the competitions behind, but at the same time business asks for competition in the market. Because in business it is only then that success can be achieved. Nicholas Negroponte succeeded because of the constant pressure of competition, and it was Intel which helped him reach this far.