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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."
It seems to me that the children to whom these laptops are going don't need whizbang computing power, they just need basic computing ability. The OLPC project has no need to "argue the technical merits" of their device against potentially more powerful (but more expensive) competition when the price for this technology is the lowest around.
Competition is good, but anti-competition is bad. Negroponte's argument is that the big boys are smothering XO in the crib with half-assed attempts at being cheap (but DRM and IP laden).
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
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"If Negreponte's goal is to get cheap laptops in the hands of poor children, why would he be angry?"
If Microsoft and Intel put Negreponte out of 'business' by selling subsidised low-cost PCs, how long do you think they'll continue to sell them afterwards?
They're not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, they're doing it because they see a competitor they want to eliminate.
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.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Maybe a long time if Walmart decides that selling $200 laptops along side their $200 desktops sounds like a good idea. Granted that won't help children in developing nations much, but it'd sure do something interesting to the PC market.
Who needs agriculture? They can just order food online after making some quick cash with some online scams.
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The real annoying thing is that they are not jumping in the market to help kids but undermine a non profit so they can get the market. Other companies like AMD have been helping the effort, but Microsoft and Intel see it as competition. This is a non profit effort. Next the pharmaceuticals will be going after the red cross because they want to sell cheap blood alternatives to disaster victims. Yeah competition! I am proud to have gotten one.
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.
If so, I'm sorry to say he lacks the cynicism to deal with politicians, specially those from third world nations. These individuals will endorse any project that makes them look good. An OLPC endorsement is marketing gold from a politician's point of view, because it ties education, children and technology -- areas which third world nations are very reluctant to invest in -- all at zero cost.
Talk is cheap.
I'm not sure who I'm madder at: Intel & Microsoft for their transparent claims of "trying to help", the potential recipients of the XO who are being fooled into not ordering it, or folks like you who are not seeing any problem with this whole cock-up.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
There's a big difference between actual competition (which is great) and competition that exists only long enough to bankrupt a competitor so that your primary market is extended (if only for a few more months).
If MS and Intel want to seriously get -- and STAY -- in the game of providing system for the developing world, that's great. The concern is that they'll produce just enough press releases for the XO to stop getting orders it needs to stay viable, then once the XO is basically dead, MS/Intel say "oh, well now that we look at the market, we really think tour new $500 design is more appropriate". Then it would take another year or three for the XO or something similar to get back into production. Anyone with more than a few months of experience in the computer industry is familiar with this pattern.
As a side note, I was shocked when my sister, who is about as technical as "my computer's cupholder is broken!" actually mentioned the "buy one get one" promotion over Thanksgiving. They've done a great job marketing, even if my sister didn't have any idea what the program was about or what made the computer unusual, she just knew about it as the $150 laptop.
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What is being offered by Microsoft and Intel is an inferior, but more expensive product. They are trying to leverage their (arguable) monopolies to not only set a higher price than the market wants, but to make sure legions of children don't grow up learning non-Intel, non-Microsoft products.
It is hard to blame Microsoft entirely, since they can't exactly compete with free. Intel, on the other hand, has no excuse. If they were truly acting competitively, they would try to sell Negroponte on their processors and compete with AMD (you know, their actual competitor) that way, and not screw over those kids in the process.
Competition is good...
However, Monopolies are bad. This is a clear case of a monopoly using its power to stifle long term competition at a short term profit loss.
Do you honestly think Microsoft would offer both an OS and Office for $3 if it wasn't trying to stifle competition? As soon as the OLPC project is broke and a memory, expect the price of Microsoft's software to increase exponentially.
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I agree that's a bit more than Vista is really worth, but maybe they'll give up another 20-40% on volume orders.
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Actually, they have done something. If you haven't noticed, computers have gone from being $10K to $300 or less for a budget machine. Laptops are also getting ever cheaper and were going to be hitting the $300 price point themselves because middle-class kids all want laptops and not all parents are all that rich. There are two kinds of poor countries we're talking about here: There's China and India, who don't need our help, their economies are exploding and are going to take care of themselves, and then there's the African countries wracked with violence who wouldn't have money to spare on laptops for all their children no matter how cheap they were.
I'm not sure about Intel's role in this, but Microsoft undoubtedly sees a threat beyond what's being discussed here. The threat isn't directly Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child project, it's Linux. If you put a cheap laptop in the hands of a few hundred million kids, they won't grow up to be afraid of it. That's the real threat. Microsoft's threat horizon exceeds a generation.
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Depends who does the buying...
If the people buying these machines aren't spending their own money, and intel or microsoft offer them some money into their own back pocket in exchange for spending more of someone else's money, what do you think they'll do?
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But in this case, companies are entering a [new] market in order to kill competition. No wonder, even in the so called developed capitalist markets of the industrialized world like Canada, no foreigner can own a majority stake in the telecommunications sector for example.
The problem is companies like Microsoft and Intel go unpunished when they effect a coup de grace, against a gentleman like Negreponte, who is actually trying to do SOMETHING. Fact is no one knows what the real solution is, but you can't defend Microsoft's right to participate in foreign corruption just because the place is a shit-hole.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Studies in India have shown that the best way to reduce population growth in a democracy is to educate women. Percolation of computers and cell phones into the rural areas have allowed significant (class room/world exposure type of) education to happen even outside the schools. This has been a more recent phenomenon and while these have had definite economic advantages (e.g. google - kerala fishermen cell phones). It is not clear as yet whether this type of education will also help in the same way but it definitely seems plausible. In the absence of coercion there appears to be no other reliable way to reduce the growth rate. Needless to say, the benefits of education and access to computers has obvious advantages in things like agriculture, etc.
If it's more expensive and inferior then it'll be unsuccessful.
Only if the market is actually free (of biased legislation, etc.)
Behold "peace" with Intel and M$:
but
Par for the Wintel course, self restraint is foolish because M$ and Intel will always pull every trick they can. When convicted monopolists urge you to hold back, listening to them is the worst thing you can do. Intel traded a few million dollars for what's going to millions of units in sales. That's too bad, because Windoze is the wrong OS for the job.
It's easy to see that the usual one size fits all Windoze is not useful to school children, especially those in the developing world. It's designed for US fortune 500 businesses and to satisfy the wants of the MAFIAA. It's dependent on a $400 "office" suite for the most basic of paper writing in English and it has little else. Native editing and authoring tools are pathetic, networking is designed for an office LAN and media tools are designed to extract money from rich US college students rather than to encourage creativity. Foreign language support in Windoze is pathetic, as you would expect from software that can't take corrections in the field. All of this can be said about M$'s latest and greatest OS. I'm scared of what they have to offer for $3. Any developing nation that wants to see what will happen to the Intel machine has only to look at what happens to the millions of used laptops the developed world disposes of daily in their backyard. Laptops being tossed out by the developed world are more powerful and have better software but could be used right now by developing nations for next to nothing. They are not used because they are not well suited to the task and Wintel laptops that make it to the developing world today are sent there as toxic waste. OLPC addressed all of these concerns in their design.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Good question, and the answer is that Negroponte's goal is NOT to get cheap laptops in the hands of poor children.
http://laptop.org/vision/index.shtml
"It's an education project, not a laptop project."
-- Nicholas Negroponte
No matter how many times it is explained over and over again it seems Intel and Microsoft have successfully twisted this story of constructive education into some cheap assed laptops for the poor expanding market dilema where there is a need for competition. If Negroponte is pissed he has good reason to be and anyone at Intel or Microsoft who has been involved in the stupid classmate PC project and the efforts to kill OLPC should be ashamed of their scum bag used car salesman tactics.
Negroponte and his team put in the effort to research and develop their constructive education idea and now that they have implemented all their learnings and research into a ready to deploy solution you have these greedy bastards trying to destroy the project in the name of market share and profits. And make no mistake about it, neither Intel nor Microsoft actually have any interest in the goals of the OLPC project or the poor countries it is intended for, their involvement is self serving and designed to generate PR so they can maintain mind share in their current markets, not in some imagined expanding market in poor countries where they see potential for profit.
I may come across as rather harsh on the classmate PC and Microsoft and Intel's actions but again I think its deserved considering the years of work the OLPC people put into a non-profit project with admirable goals only to see it threatened in the name of greed.
Not true at all. The poster child for the situation is Netscape, but Microsoft has "done a Netscape" on lots of other startups.
Fact is, a high-quality product by a small, underfunded company can be and often is squashed by a poor-quality product with a large advertising budget. That has been Microsoft's approach from the very start, when they had the huge IBM budget behind the first model "IBM PC". The tech world smugly predicted that such a shoddy, overpriced computer couldn't possibly succeed against the many better things that were already for sale. But it did succeed, and most of those CP/M companies are long gone, because people recognized the IBM brand, and IBM could spend more on the ad campaign than the entire operating budgets of all its competitors combined.
That's exactly what MS will try here, and chances are very good that they'll end up bankrupting the OLPC project before it gets off the ground. MS has already shown that it's willing to use bribery and back-room politics to derail OLPC orders. They've probably learned to not be quite so blatant, and cover their tracks a bit better, and they may well succeed with such tactics in many cases.
This campaign could well be yet another textbook case in how monopoly capitalism works. Stay tuned; it'll probably be well covered here, though not in the mainstream media.
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There are a number of things wrong with that statement. It's an extremest point of view that "we shouldn't worry about X until Y and Z are fixed". Similar statements are "we shouldn't try to cure aids until after we cure cancer". Yes, parts/most of Africa has a number of problems larger than "kids don't have laptops". But if you know anything about this project, it's not about giving kids laptops so they can bang around on MySpace all day like american kids do. I suggest you get educated about the project, goals, the technology implementations, etc. Download an emulated version. Try out the server version that teachers/schools will run. Understand the potential impact on education in Africa, which may accelerate forward progress of upcoming generations in Africa.
I would include dishonest advertising as another factor making a market non-free.
Then explain windows' success.
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.
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.
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