HOWZAT

The question raised by Bender’s departure was: is OLPC an open-source crusade, or is it a project to spread computing to the poor by any means available? In practice, OLPC has answered no to the first and yes to the second. But, if it is just about spreading computing to the poor, then is the XO itself that important? Wouldn’t any cheap laptop be just as good? It is this question that lies at the heart of the most spectacular crisis surrounding the project: the war with Intel. And here we come to my new best friend Agnes.

Microsoft may have used words and a refusal to co-operate as its weapons against the XO; Intel used brute force. The company dominates global computer hardware in the way that Microsoft dominates the software. And, like Microsoft, it is a fierce protector of its ascendancy. So fierce, in fact, that the Federal Trade Commission in the US has recently opened an investigation into its alleged anti-competitive practices designed to shut out AMD. On the academic side of the OLPC project, they were shocked by the ferocity with which Intel attempted to kill their product. On the business side, they just shrugged and they all said the same thing: “It’s in their DNA.”

Intel’s response to the XO was the Classmate. It is nothing like as radical a machine in that it is, basically, a straightforward Windows laptop. Intel will tie itself in knots rather than admit its laptop was a response to OLPC’s.

My Intel spokesperson, Agnes Kwan, seems to exist to evade the issue. I played e-mail ping-pong with her over several days. She was trying to avoid giving me any dates that would show the Classmate came after the XO. This included sending me a bizarre and barely literate “ethnographic” study of computing in the developed world. In the end, all she would say about the timeline of the Classmate was: “It’s hard to pinpoint a start date with the nature of ethnographic research in which ethnographers collect data over a long period of time.” Sorry?

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Many in the industry says the Classmate was intended to be an XO killer and that’s how Intel behaved. Their formidable global sales operation charged into any market in which OLPC might get a foothold, trashing the XO and pushing the Classmate. Nigeria, where Negroponte had one of his handshake deals with President Obasanjo, was a typical example. In August 2006, Craig Barrett, Intel chairman, wrote a hard-sell letter to Obasanjo asking for a meeting in which he could explain their World Ahead programme, “which is chartered to extend PC access to the world’s next billion users”. This programme had been launched in May 2006, 15 months after the OLPC announcement at Davos – bit of a dead giveaway there, Craig. Barrett’s letter was backed up by documents listing “the shortcoming of the OLPC approach”.

These documents having been leaked, they became a significant embarrassment to Intel. Here was a mighty company trying to crush a philanthropic project. In May last year they seemed ready for a truce and a deal was done. Intel would join the OLPC board, invest $6m in the company, there would be moves to put an Intel chip in the XO, and there would be no more slagging off of the XO in the marketplace. The deal failed with almost Middle Eastern speed and finality. Intel attended only one board meeting and Intel salesmen – “it’s in their DNA” – carried on slagging off the XO. Intel also tried to parcel up the world into easy markets for Intel and hard ones for OLPC.

“You mean,” says Negroponte of this phase, “Ethiopia is mine and Mongolia isn’t?”

At the same time, Negroponte was demanding Intel stop marketing the Classmate. Intel refused on the basis that there was room for a plurality of solutions to the “digital divide”. On this issue – says Agnes – the deal collapsed and Intel left the board in January. Even the departure was contentious. Negroponte said there was a deal to say nothing until there could be a joint announcement. But, of course, Intel went ahead and spoke to the press anyway.

“It’s quite obvious,” says an OLPC spokesman, “that they waited until very late in the day to make it nearly impossible for OLPC representatives on the East Coast to get their side of the story in the ‘first stories’.” Bruce Sewell of Intel e-mailed Negroponte to apologise, saying “instructions were misunderstood internally”.

I put all this to dear Agnes. No comment.

Destructive as all this sounds, it represents a kind of success for OLPC. First, whatever Intel tries not to say, it is almost certain that the OLPC inspired the Classmate and cheap computers from others. Furthermore, as many on the business side of OLPC pointed out, the very fact that giants like Microsoft and Intel were bothering to trash the XO indicated the power of this idea to get under their skin. “If Nicholas hadn’t said what he said in January ’05,” says Dan Shine at AMD in Austin, Texas, “this machine wouldn’t be here and a lot of other technologies and discussions wouldn’t be here. He accelerated people getting access by probably years.”

And, finally, however “impure” it may be to the open sourcers, putting Windows on the XO was a huge breakthrough in the computing industry because Microsoft has let them have Windows XP for $3 per computer. One of the previous industry certainties was that Microsoft never ever sells anything cheap.

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