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Intel Laptop Competes With One Laptop Per Child
Tracy Reed writes "According to the BBC, Intel has designed and begun marketing it's own low-cost laptop targeted at education in developing countries. 'Professor Negroponte, who aims to distribute millions of laptops to kids in developing countries, said Intel had hurt his mission "enormously". Speaking to US broadcaster CBS, Intel's chairman denied the claims. "We're not trying to drive him out of business," said Craig Barrett. "We're trying to bring capability to young people." Mr Barrett has previously dismissed the $100 laptop as a "gadget".'"
Weren't there at least a dozen comments in the last OLPC story that pretty much debunked this idea that Intel's offering was in any way comparable to OLPC's? Oh wait, I forgot to look up and to the left...
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Isn't this a good thing? Isn't having many companies working towards the same objective, offering similar products, good for competition, and good for making things cheaper in the end? Maybe lots of competition could give us the $50 laptop. Having a monopoly in any business, even charity, or to help the poor, is necessary to ensure that costs are being kept to a minimum. How do we know that the $50 laptop isn't possible unless there's competition against the guy offering the $100 laptop.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
AMD makes the processors for the OLPC. Never mind that Intel is undercutting the OLPC at a loss just to gain market share on what may be one the largest untapped markets for computers.
I think the problem is two-fold:
1. If Intel were really interested in "trying to bring capability to young people" then why didn't they sign on with the OLPC project in the first place? By having Intel generate a separate project, resources are inherently divided. According to TFA, Intel originally laughed at the idea of OLPC. Now they are copying it. Why didn't they just agree to help OLPC?
2. In TFA, Negroponte reportedly is accusing Intel of selling their Classmate PC below production cost. Such a tactic is used, of course, to driver others out of the market, so as to establish monopoly. If OLPC and Intel both try to sell their laptops to various countries, and the Intel one has "more bang for the buck" (because they are subsidizing it), then obviously countries will pick the Intel one. Then OLPC dies and suddenly the Intel ones start mysteriously costing more.
The OLPC project has the aim to create extremely inexpensive educational laptops in a cost-effective way. They want a sustainable solution to education. Intel, according to Negroponte, is not working towards that goal.
Which would you rather use?
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
Again, Intel is just trying to generate press, "Look at us! Look at how great we are! We are trying to help the poor!"
And AMD wasn't when they inked a deal with OLPC?
Intel would be more advise to give money to the OLPC project so the per-system cost could be lowered. Team work is needed here, not competition.
That would be completely stupid of Intel. First, it would be putting money in the pockets of AMD. Second, AMD press would have an absolute field day -- "If Intel trusts us for the hard stuff, shouldn't you?" The reality is that Intel's choices were roll their own, or stay out completely.
-- Old Man Kensey
Having seen that interview he did last night, I'd say it's at least as much about his ego than actually helping kids. He doesn't just want the kids helped, he also wants everyone coming an patting HIM on the back for it and telling him what a great guy he is.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I totally agree, but was trying to hold back on saying that explicitly based on a single short article.
The intel system is simply not useful in the places where the OLPC is most needed. But by existing it effectively drives up the cost of the OLPC; less OLPCs will be sold, reducing the effects of volume, and keeping the prices higher. The OLPC is not a moneymaking attempt, it is there to help the world. Intel is not there to help the world, they're there to make money. Thus intel's quest for cash is harming the OLPC project, while at the same time, the ClassmatePC cannot help people that the OLPC can. I think it's reasonable to be upset at intel's metooism.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
His main complaint is that Intel is "dumping", that is, selling them below cost (and more importantly, below the OLPC's price) just to get a foothold on what could grow into a really nice monopoly somday.
Intel with $$$ vs. a non-profit group with no $$$... that's just poor sportsmanship. Intel needs to back off.
The objective of the OLPC project is not to have "a cheap, robust laptop for education".
It is to provide educational innovations centered around a cheap, robust laptop for education. OLPC is not just providing a laptop, or a laptop+software, but also coordinating a number of related services and content and content distribution systems, etc.
OLPC is like apple, it's and end-to-end specification. I forget which CPU they are using, I assume it's a VIA since the whole thing is 4 watts. But even if it were an Intel CPU it's a grave danger.
1) Like apple they could choose to change processors at any time. Thus they could move away from X86 if they wished.
2) they will establish a huge software market that does not use intel specific advancements.
3) It will use graphics other then Intel graphics
In short by creating an enourmous consumer market for generic lowest common demoninator software, it removes a tremendous amount of product differentiation the INtel sells. To see this think back about 8 years ago when you had a choice of buying an intel P4 or P3 or buying whatever AMD was selling. You were not really sure if all your code optimizers would work on AMD, not sure if certain drivers would fail on AMD. It was a gamble. The answer was in most cases there was no problems at all. But we all had seen examples of problems. Intel was the safe bet. Plus when optimizations using SSE or analogs came out they were written for intel first. And lord save you if you bought Via or god forbid, transmeta.
With a giant market in non-intel optimizations out there this advantage will be nullified. Software will respect the generic CPU needs. That hurts intel's premium price advantage.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Comparing labtop.org to classmatepc.com (Organiation VS Commercial Business) is that the labtop.org is trying to be the best it can be. It's Open source and basically open everything. If the kid wants to program up the next Halo then they can do that with the OLPC, however Intel (And M$) does seem to just want to just cut into the business and give these kids a cheap windowsbox. However we all know that when these M$ boxesneed upgrading, they are going to have to shell out more money for ClassmatePC Vista or whatever.
I'm hoping OLPC is able to knock Intel and M$ out and show the world it's not about getting more consumers, but getting education to more people.
This is not the main goal of the Microsoft/Intel project. They will say this to the public but their intentions are to stop the competitions products from gaining a significant market share. Both Microsoft and Intel had been offered opportunities to be part of the OLPC project and most likely pricing was their main issue. Negroponte knows this and it is likey why he said what he did in the 60Minutes piece.
If Intel can pull it off cheaper, should I feel bad for Negroponte?
They can't but they can get Microsoft involved and split the loss so they can compete with a small group who have researched and invested a few years into making it work and have no licensing issues/expenses by using Linux and OSS. Again, Negroponte knows this because they've already tried to negotiate with Microsoft and Intel along with know what such hardware is going to cost to manufacture in quantity.
If this is truly altruistic work, then he should embrace Intel's commitment, and try to work together.
Microsoft and Intel have no purpose doing what they are doing but to protect their marketshare and their brand names. Both of which help them keep their prices and market pricing at fat profit levels. The OLPC does not appear to be driven by profits and what Negroponte has done in the past shows he has an altruistic foundation. Microsoft nor Intel can show this and history shows quite the opposite.
If this is for-profit capitalism, merely disguised as charity, then may the best man win.
One side is business profit driven( Microsoft/Intel-ClassMatePC ) while the other is charity driven( OLPC ). They are crossing paths and we already know that the billions behind the Microsoft/Intel project is hurting the OLPC project since Negroponte has already said this.
And it just blows me away that Intel would fall for this level when there has been nothing said in the press or otherwise which would have locked Intel out of future designs. AMD is not giving their CPU's away for free. Now Microsoft, that's another story since they absolutely can not allow Linux and OSS to gain traction anywhere. Once you've stopped cleaning Windows, you don't go back and with the open nature of the OLPC, the closed box of Microsoft Windows/software would be painful and constraining.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Some of the reasons the costs are lower than an mp3 player are because only governments can by this in bulk
1) pass on all distribution, shipping, marketing costs to the government.
2) likewise no warrantee or after sales service.
3) only volume pre-orders. so their is no risk to the manfacturer on scale of production. All ecnomoies of scale are achieved on the first order.
4) Other than the software there's no expensive cutting edge components.
5) no retail stores, no middlemen, no warehouses.
6) no sales floor packaging.
Presumably those costs account for the majority of costs in the sales price of your MP3, which if it lacked any of those you would not buy it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Most children have laps.
They do not necessarily have desks.
Or bicycles.
Or generators.
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions
Deleted
I'm sure that an important contribution comes from M$ who will not sit back and watch OLPC educate the kids in developing countries in using Linux and FOSS. M$ wants them hooked on Windows. Also, a slightly faster CPU can easily make Intel's laptop more attractive than AMD's offer. A serious loss now is worth a lot more later when the market will be able to absorb the cost of Windoze.
Bicycle and a generator? This might work if you are stranded on an uncharted desert isle with a professor to set things up and a couple of hot actresses to make innovative dishes from coconuts. That one hundred dollar pc would turn into a six hundred dollar pc really quick when you add a new Schwinn bike and a generator to it and without the Professor around to fix things when they broke how long would they last?
load "$",8,1
Ah, yes. Unless the laptop in question has the mega resolution of the modern desktop - it's not useable. The fact that 800x400 (or 640x480) worked quite well for thousands (millions?) of PCs for years is simply irrelevant.
'Straining' is a subjective judgement - not a fact that can be discerned from the picture.
Which I would use is utterly irrelevant, as the criteria for my machine are vastly different from the criteria by which an educational machine should be judged.
Okay, I'm only going to explain this one more time, then I am going to write you off as too stupid to understand. At that point I will actually go and remove one of my relationships just so I can add you as a foe.
Negroponte would, I am sure, be interested in working with intel if they were interested in working with him, which they are not - they have demonstrated this with their repeated unfounded attacks on the OLPC project.
Then it would turn out that (were he not dead) he had done it solely to get into their good graces, so that his troops could come in disguised as aid workers, and commit genocide.
The situation here is similar in more ways than you probably appreciate. Intel is taking on the OLPC not so that it can help students with education - if they were interested in assisting with education, they wouldn't be attacking the OLPC, which addresses the needs of an entirely different group of users. The ClassmatePC is useful primarily in the first world, and it has a TPM chip in it which addresses the needs not of users, but of media corporations. Surely the system could have been cheaper without TPM?
But more importantly, information is the only thing that can save people scrabbling around in the dirt and cooking their food over a plastic fire because all the trees are gone. And the OLPC suits the needs of providing that information to people living in places where there are no electrical outlets than the ClassmatePC, which would be completely and totally useless in such a situation.
Yes, and this conversation comes down to who this is really about - Negroponte, or you. It's really not about him. It's about you thinking that you know better than he does whether he should or shouldn't work with a company that has been sabotaging the project which he is sweating over from day one.
If someone announces their intent to destroy me, I usually don't try to make friends with them; I'm too afraid that while I'm shaking their right hand, they'll stab me with the left. Tell you what, next time a mugger demands your wallet, why don't you suggest that the two of you go into business together? I'm sure you'll get along famously.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nope, and so I would look forward to Intel (or anyone else) offering a super-cheap laptop like this on the open market, regardless of the effect on OLPC. You'd think that a group of engineers who get tired of hearing people say "Let me buy your product" would, you know, sell it to them.
Revive the Constitution.
Actually, it's a bit deeper than that. Intel is spreading FUD about the OLPC project in general, and about the XO (the OLPC laptop) in particular. This is not unlike Microsoft's vaporware product announcements designed to forestall customers adopting or migrating to software made by Microsoft's competitors. The difference here is that Intel's product offering is not exactly vaporware. What it is, though, is a more expensive piece of hardware that's being subsidized by Intel to force market adoption, at the expense of OLPC. The accusation here is that Intel is pricing their offering below-cost to drive OLPC out of the market. Here in the U.S., the practice is called "dumping," and is ostensibly illegal.
If OLPC becomes stillborn due to Intel's efforts (an outcome Intel would probably welcome), do you think Intel's commitment to their own laptops-for-kids initiative will persist, or will it evaporate?
People, Don't forget that with this OLPC system, not only does M$ crap itself at the thought of millions of linux competent kids, as intel does in chips, but Intel could loose out in another way, as could M$
OLPC is a paradigm shift in computing. There are NO licence costs, everything is useable, for free, Everything has been designed from the ground up, its a new legacy free, tightly tuned computer that has thrown out all the old PC baggage and nastyness, with a new light, useable OS, that can fly on a 350ish MHz machine.
If it works, there is no reason why they cant make desktop systems using the same code, optimised, open source components. Imagine an OLPC desktop with 512MB RAM and a hard drive, and perhaps an 800MHz chip. It could potentially change home desktop computing in developing worlds forever.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
A hand-powered, field-capable, inexpensive wireless laptop is something that many many consumers want very much.
That means there's almost no chance of them ever becoming available to the public.
The corporate world no longer believes they have to give consumers what they want. Because, we have become the consumables.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sure, but so what? How would that be any better or cheaper?
Right: small and durable (and low-power). Hence, a laptop.
Really, even if you were trying not to give them laptops, by the time you analyze the requirements you end up with a laptop anyway! Why fight it?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Actually, there are very good reasons for Negroponte to object, such as the fact that the OLPC project actually has useful educational software, while the Intel thing only exists to brainwash people with Windows. If it's not in the article, then it just means the author was too stupid to understand that.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Isn't this a shitstorm. I especially like the fellow who coined the term "armchair economists" -- clearly, his trimester of community college economics 101 has left him quite enamored with the idea of perfect competition and all the wonderful things that it entails. Unfortunately, markets (other than a handful of notable exceptions) don't work like that. There is no perfect information; there are significant barriers to entry; consumers, and in this case governments (Third World governments, no less) don't always act in a utility-maximizing way. The addition of a competitor need not make things better, at all.
We're not dealing with free market economics here, there is a multitude of ways in which they are and can be distorted -- hell, the market doesn't even exist, yet. There is no infrastructure in place. The final consumers aren't the ones making the decisions, either -- governments are. Had I decided on which laptop I'd want as a gift instead of my father, then HP would have sold one less "entertainment laptop" with an integrated Intel Graphics Accelerator. There is a limited number of (quite possibly poorly informed, certainly if Intel can help it) customers. Government officials don't always know what the hell they're doing, and they can certainly be susceptible to meaningless marketing drivel (not to mention gifts). There is no reason whatsoever why the best product will win the competition in this case, and unless Intel can increase the value to the children, for whom the laptops are intended in the first place, enough to make up for the losses of economies of scale by OLPC (not to mention the possibility of its complete demise), a market with two participants makes no sense whatsoever.
This is quite possibly a one-shot endeavor; it has to succeed now, or it will written off as worthless. There may not be a second round -- if Intel uses its considerable capital to price OLPC out of the market by offering their laptops below cost, there may not be any coming back if Intel decide to pull out due to lack of profits later on. I haven't heard anyone argue that the Classmate is a better machine for the purpose of educating Third World children yet, and I find this most telling.
On the one hand, we have a consortium of corporations (you could go with just Intel I suppose, but I'm quite certain that Microsoft are backing the project, as does everyone else here it seems) with considerable economic and marketing muscle, whose sole purpose it is to make a profit off of their operations. On the other, we have a non-profit organization whose purpose it is to provide children with educational opportunities in parts of the world that need them; to reach as many children as possible by minimizing costs; to design a machine which best serves those goals. The latter is what's at stake here -- it doesn't take a genius to figure out which direction Intel will go in if Intel's goals (making a profit) clash with the purpose of the project.
Finally, I'm amused by the cynicism and ad hominem attacks against Negroponte. A project which he obviously feels strongly about (and believes will do a lot of good) is jeopardized by people who're in it to make a buck. If he believed that Intel's involvement would better serve the goals of OLPC, his reaction may have been entirely different. He does not, and he has every reason not to. He's snappy about it, and so am I -- and I'm not even personally involved in the project.
You think OLPC will come back once Intel gives up? People will have moved on, investors already got burned. There would always be the threat that Intel would respond and give them another beat down. If they already lost that battle once, why would they want to fight it again, without the headstart this time.
I don't think your last bullet exists as a real possibility.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx