Well, it's official; Intel has pulled out of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program and it appears that they might have had a good reason. A post on ZDnet provides a pretty good explanation and suggests that OLPC head Nicholas Negroponte wanted Intel to abandon their own low-cost Classmate PC, seeing it as a competitor to OLPC's XO laptop.
The XO laptop is also using an AMD processor, so I suppose that also didn't sit well with the folks from Intel even though there had been talks of future versions that would use an Intel processor. Intel had only joined the OLPC project in July 2007, but in months prior to that Negroponte had said the chip giant should be ashamed of itself for selling its Classmate machine for less than it cost to make in order to undermine OLPC's XO machine.
OLPC president Walter Bender said the disagreement with Intel wasn't just about the Classmate. He said relations broke down because of "a complete lack of cooperation by Intel on software, learning etc", according to IDG. He accused Intel of treating the project as just another market.
If you're not familiar with OLPC, the mission of the project is "To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves". A key goal of the project was to keep the cost of the laptop below $100, but they've been having trouble controlling costs and the price is now closer to $200, which might make it difficult for developing countries to take advantage of the program.
The recent "Give One, Get One" program that was run over the holidays sounds like a success, with OLPC reporting to have shipped around 50,000 XO laptops to North American customers which means a matching number should be shipping to countries like Libya, Brazil, Argentina and Thailand, but as many as 150,000 units may have been donated through the program.
I don't know what kind of flak Intel is going to receive for exiting from an entrepreneurial effort like this and it's too bad they couldn't have stayed onboard. Do you think Intel should have stayed or do you think too much pressure was brought to bear regarding their "competing" Classmate PC?
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