Intel Leaves Group Backing Education PCs
SAN FRANCISCO — Intel said Thursday that it had chosen to withdraw from the One Laptop Per Child educational computer organization, which it joined in July after years of public squabbling between Intel's chairman, Craig R. Barrett, and the group's founder, Nicholas P. Negroponte.
Context & Ripple Effects
The withdrawal undoes a six-month-old truce. After a public war of words between Craig Barrett and Nicholas Negroponte through early 2007, Intel joined One Laptop Per Child in July, and the alliance was read as the chipmaker endorsing the nonprofit's low-cost education laptop rather than fighting it.
That reading lasted barely two quarters. Intel's exit lands days before CES, where the company has been showcasing its own small-device direction — UMPC concepts and a super-small solid state drive at its December Pre-CES briefing — underscoring that Intel intends to serve low-cost portable computing through its own product lines rather than through OLPC's.
First-order effects
- OLPC loses its highest-profile industry partner and whatever funding and engineering weight came with it, leaving Negroponte's group without a chipmaker inside the tent just as it scales deployments.
- Intel walks away free to compete directly for the same education and emerging-market buyers with its own low-cost portable platforms, unencumbered by nonprofit commitments.
Second-order effects
- OLPC must now source its silicon entirely from vendors without a rival consumer stake in cheap laptops, making component supply and pricing more dependent on partners who see no conflict of interest.
- Governments and education ministries evaluating cheap laptops face a starker choice between a nonprofit standard and commercially backed alternatives, with Intel's CES-positioned UMPC and SSD work giving the commercial side fresh hardware to pitch.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, corporate-nonprofit alliances in educational computing prove fragile whenever the corporate partner ships a competing product — pushing vendors toward either full commitment or open rivalry, with little stable middle ground.
- Developing-market laptop programs increasingly get shaped by which platform vendors back them, turning school computing into an extension of the semiconductor industry's low-cost device strategies rather than a purely philanthropic project.
The trend: Low-cost computing for the developing world is splitting into a contest between nonprofit-led standards and chipmakers' own commercial device lines, with Intel's exit from OLPC marking the collapse of the bridge between the two.