Intel Employee Caught Running OLPC News Site

An anonymous reader noted yet another story about credibility and disclosure on-line. An OLPC news site highly critical of the project was run by an Intel employee who actually is working on a project that competes with the OLPC. Oh, and the site failed to disclose this pretty serious bit of bias. The article talks about the most extreme interpretation ("Intel secretly bankrolls blog that disses competitor") but even the less extreme version ("insider badmouths competitors anonymously at night") is pretty fishy. Just more reasons to never believe anything on-line, including me I guess.

Comments

Completely Unnecessary

[Anonymous Coward]

This strikes me as the exact same brand of stupidity which Microsoft's strong-arming companies into using Windows or IE represented... in that it was completely unnecessary.

In the same way Windows and IE were going to win out eventually on pure superiority of their product, so too all Intel has to do is wait around for the XO craptop to fail. There's absolutely no reason to engage in unethical behavior, because the result you are looking for is ALREADY inevitable.

The XO is doomed, simply because it can't even deliver on the pathetic goals it started out with. By the time Negroponte finally gets his little craptops rolling out, Dell will likely be selling low-end, fully functional Windows machines at the same price point. Now granted, it's probably going to take OLPC about three more years to even roll anything out, so Dell and other manufacturers have a pretty wide time frame to work in.

It's just flogging a dead horse, and it's really sad to see them engage in this kind of "poor winner" kind of behavior. They end up winning, but it just makes them look bad.