...participants peppered Mr. Negroponte and other project officials with questions about teacher training and software bugs. "It will always have bugs in it and it will never be perfect," Mr. Negroponte told them...
Which goes to show that being a professor at MIT doesn't automatically make you good at sales. Bragging about only using $1 on overhead is nice, but if they could sell 10 times as many laptops by charging twice as much for them and spending half of that money on marketing/sales, they'd still be getting more laptops to children...
Microsoft, Intel, et al are really acting in a despicably greedy manner here. That being said, they're all just trying to be good capitalists. It's a depressing situation.
Intel is more successful than OLPC so far, measured in numbers of sales. The competition was bitter. Intel recently donated millions of dollars to OLPC, joined the board, and the companies signed a "non-disparagement" clause. The next version of the OLPC will use an Intel processor instead of an AMD processor.
>Mr. Negroponte says he complained to Intel's chief executive two weeks ago, then "made peace." Intel and the One Laptop project, he says, have agreed to work together to design by early January a new "Intel-based" One Laptop device. An Intel spokeswoman confirmed Mr. Negroponte's account, but said any comment would be "premature." AMD, whose chips are used in One Laptop's current machines, declined to comment.
I could also see Intel releasing a version of their Classmate that runs the OLPC OS.
Which goes to show that being a professor at MIT doesn't automatically make you good at sales. Bragging about only using $1 on overhead is nice, but if they could sell 10 times as many laptops by charging twice as much for them and spending half of that money on marketing/sales, they'd still be getting more laptops to children...