Intel and Microsoft will clean Negroponte’s clock

I think the One Laptop Per Child nitiative is a great idea. I just hope it survives.

The idea of a $100-or-so laptop for the developing world is important. Nicholas Negroponte is a brilliant visionary. He demonstrated that time and again at the MIT Media Lab, and he demonstrated it against with the OLPC initiative.

My first serious exposure to the OLPC project came at the AMD Global Vision Conference in September 2006, where I had the pleasure of hearing Negroponte talk about the laptop, and then chat with him afterwards. Negroponte was there, of course, because Advanced Micro Devices – not Intel – was supplying the platform for the Linux-powered OLPC laptop.

That was, obviously, a huge public relations coup for AMD, and gave OLPC and Negroponte a highly visible sponsor. However, the choice of AMD as a sole supplier was guaranteed to turn Intel into OLPC’s deadly enemy. And indeed, Intel responded with the Classmate, a straight-on competitor, which is stealing the wind from Negroponte’s sails.

While Negroponte’s choice of AMD made perfectly fine sense, there was no technological reason to make AMD an exclusive supplier. The visionary didn’t see that making an enemy out of the #1 microprocessor supplier was a very bad idea, and might imperil his altruism.

What Negroponte should have done is announced specs for a low-cost, low-power x86 processor, and put it out to bid. When it came to chips, both the AMD and Intel processors cost money. Whoever was assembling the OLPC laptop had to buy chips from someone. It could have been either processor – or both processors.

In practice, there should be no difference between an OLPC laptop running with an AMD chip and another in the same village with an Intel chip. Plus, having a choice might drive down prices. Never forget the power of competition, or the dangers of having a single source for a hardware component.

The other technological choice in the OLPC laptop, of course, is Linux, which turned Microsoft into a mortal enemy of the project as well. That may have been unavoidable. Linux is free, Windows is not free. Worst, neither Windows nor Linux are interoperable with each other without introducing extreme amounts of complexity. It would not be practical to design, build and distribute some OLPC laptops running Linux and others running Windows.

Negroponte had to choose. He chose Linux. That made Microsoft an enemy.

But did he have to create an enemy? What if Negroponte had invited Microsoft to contribute software or services for the OLPC, perhaps a version of Internet Explorer, Windows Media Services or MSN? Then, Microsoft might have been a supporter and a friend.

Would OLPC’s cozying up to Intel and Microsoft have been technologically necessary? Of course not. Negroponte and OLPC has demonstrated that they don’t need Intel or Microsoft to build their OLPC laptop. (The Intel Classmate also runs Linux, by the way.)

Would that have been politically necessary? I suggest that it would have been a wise idea. Negroponte’s vision focused solely on the Third World, but he didn’t take into account the business realities of the First World. His OLPC initiative had to make tough choices, yes, but it didn’t need to make enemies out of the industry’s top hardware and software suppliers.

I remain a strong supporter of the OLPC initiative, and am happy to do what I can to support it, such as by promoting and taking part in the Give One Get One program. However, that doesn’t mean that I am totally optimistic about the project’s success. Microsoft and Intel are powerful competitors, who wish to crush the project. I don’t see Negroponte with many allies in his camp.

Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick
2 replies
  1. John
    John says:

    If you read Negroponte’s interview on C-Span’s Q&A he tells why ADM was choosen:
    http://www.q-and-a.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1156

    I spent a lot of time trying to do that. And then finally, in January of 2005, I said to myself, I’m going to do it the way I know how. And that is to go to a few people and companies, just the way we started the Media Lab, and say, this is what we want to do. It’s a non-profit. It’s to help children. It’s to build a $100 laptop.

    The first person I went to was Hector Ruiz, who is the CEO of AMD.

    LAMB: What’s that?

    NEGROPONTE: AMD is a company that makes integrated circuits – processors in particular; they compete with Intel – and they make a processor. And Hector Ruiz himself comes from Mexico and has achieved his success through education.

    So, Hector took less than one hour to decide that he wanted to do this. And I said, ”Hector, I need a couple of million dollars from you, and I need you to do this.”

    I made exactly the same call to Rupert Murdoch, and Rupert took five minutes to make the decision.

    And then I called the founders of Google, and they took a little bit longer, because they had to talk amongst the three of them.

    But within five days, those three people, or groups, had put in the initial money and said that we could announce it, to attract others. And so, after the three, another seven joined, and we raised about $30 million in a very short period of time, just to do the engineering.

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