Phew… OLPC and Intel Get Back Together

By Andrew Meyer on July 14, 2007

Intel announced on Friday that they would be getting back together with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). The OLPC project has big plans of equipping children in developing nations with $100 laptops, which I covered here.

This is in sharp contrast to March 2007 when Nicholas Negroponte OLPC’s founder pointedly attacked Intel on 60 Minutes for marketing Intel’s own Classmate PC against the OLPC laptop. Intel has plans to distribute it’s own affordable laptop in hopes of promoting education in over 50 countries. I covered the Classmate PC here.

The OLPC has a bit more defined target user in “the most remote and poorest children of the world.” But, overall, Intel and OLPC have similar goals so Intel offered an olive branch by announcing that they would be working together. Intel even said that they would be joining OLPC’s board.

I think this relationship will be great for creating affordable technologies for low-income users around the world. Some might say that the head-to-head competition is better, which I think is true, but, somebody has to prove the market first.

Both OLPC and Intel are creating a massive amount of laptops for this unproven market, so I think it’s better for them to create a market together first before aggressively competing against each other.

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