Intel vs. OLPC: A Battle of Good Wills

For Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil, deciding what computer to give his country's youth requires more than a trip to the nearest CompUSA. He's deciding between two models of specially designed, affordable laptops, one manufactured by Intel and the other by the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) Association. Each has been designed specifically to help educate underprivileged children in developing nations. The president's isn't a bad predicament to be in; either laptop will help his country's children. But how does he decide?

 

Although Intel and OLPC advocate the same goal--one laptop in the hand of every child--their approaches are as different as their hardware designs and pricing. OLPC, a nonprofit agency, emphasizes the individual child and teaching children to use technology in innovative ways. Intel's Classmate PC is designed for students in a classroom environment and is being pitched as a "learning-assistant."

 

OLPC's founder and chairman, Nicholas Negroponte, explains how the OLPC project centers on the child's experience and personal development beyond the classroom. Incorporating open-source technology and wiki-type functionality, its XO laptop was built with more than just curriculum in mind. "We want the kids to modify and build software and learn from that. Think of our whole effort as akin to Wikipedia in nature. We will implement Wiki-textbooks," Negroponte explained in his exclusive interview with LAPTOP.  Although the XO will be in classrooms, the idea is that it will also be a personal computing device that will allow children to learn just by interacting with the technology in all parts of their lives.

 

Willy Agatstein, Intel's vice president and general manager of the Emerging Markets Platform Group, told us that the Classmate is "designed to solve a particular problem. And that problem is the state of education in the developing world." Focusing on the student, Intel's computer will be optimized for the classroom. "Our real goal was to develop a whole platform that could help individual students around the world and could reinforce the teacher/student, the student/student relationship, and if appropriate, really help the student/parent relationship," Agatstein said.

 

These different approaches have resulted in dissimilar devices. The Classmate PC has a powerful processor, support for unmodified Windows and Linux software, and costs about $250, although Intel expects the price to drop about $50 by the end of the year. OLPC's XO laptop offers a new Linux-based software platform called Sugar, as well as special features like a built-in video camera, high-resolution dual-mode screen, longer battery life, and innovative charging options for about $175. OLPC aims for this model, with these components, to be priced at $100 within three years. (Check out the side-by-side chart comparing these two laptops).

 

Knowing the computers would be compared, the companies have adopted rather harsh attitudes toward one other. Hinting at a frustration with Intel's decision to create the Classmate to compete with the Laptop XO, Negroponte commented in his interview with LAPTOP that OLPC "do[es] not compete with them, but they believe they compete with us." A letter Negroponte drafted to Intel in March 2007 but never sent reveals that OLPC approached Intel, when the XO laptop was in its initial stages of development, with the idea of partnership. The letter claims that Intel declined and two years later unveiled its Classmate prototype. When asked about the Intel/OLPC relationship, Agatstein commented, "Everyone has their own remembrances of history. I think one of the primary things here is that you have two different visions and passionate sets of people. Both are working on reaching a common goal in different ways."

 

Last month the Intel-powered Classmate PC started volume shipment to emerging markets, while the OLPC machine remains in testing mode in countries including Chile, Brazil, and Nigeria. Both OLPC and Intel have released images and information about their respective tests in Nigeria. These images are almost identical except that, in some, children hold blue laptops--Intel's machine--while others hold OLPC's green one. The villages testing the laptops aren't far from each other and are both close to Abuja, Nigeria's capital. Children who may have never had contact with their peers in the neighboring villages now can connect to the Internet and find a friend--a friend who might just be using another type of affordable and educational laptop.