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Why Intel and OLPC Parted Ways
runamock writes "The New York Times has an article that sheds some light on why Intel left the OLPC board: 'A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country's commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization's laptops in favor of Intel PCs. Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world's poorest children. But the saleswoman's tactic was the final straw for Nicholas Negroponte.'"
Negroponte is a pompous egomaniac with a proper academic's hatred of big corporations. Of course he's going to try to make them bend over backwards on top of giving him millions of dollars to fund his 'think of the children!' ego-trip, and then whine about it to the press when they behave just like a big corporation should.
Intel are a bunch of dicks?
I was surprised they came on board in the first place.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
How many times do we have to acknowledge that bringing a woman into a bunch of geeks only leads to trouble? :)
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You are quoting an "internal press release"? The "simple fact" to use your words, is that Intel's entire involvement with OLPC has been amazingly, incredibly poorly considered, and had a predictable result.
Intel, apparently, never wavered from its position that it was in competition with OLPC. Intel tried to kill the program before it got fully started; that's how it appears to the public. Internal attempts at spin control at Intel don't change the public perception that Intel has been, and will continue to be, destructive.
Intel could have given the OLPC program lower cost processors, to compete with the AMD processors used now. Instead, Intel decided to go into the low-cost, commodity consumer business? When Intel has always failed at that business? When Intel apparently has no interest in the huge issue affecting all humans, the ability of some people to educate themselves and become leaders in their communities, given some resources?
You did not address the underlying problem, which is that many people think that Intel CEO Paul Otellini has extremely poor social skills. You did not consider that Intel is still planning on doing something that can only fail, given Intel's past history and core competency. Will Intel become a strong competitor with Mattel?