Negroponte vs Intel 283
Yogi_Stewart_4 writes "More OLPC/Intel love — apparently Intel used 'underhanded' tactics to try to block sales' contracts of the OLPC, trying to reach the customer directly after an agreement had been reached.
"They would go in even after we had signed contracts and try to persuade government officials to scrap their contract and sign a contract with them instead. That's not a partnership."
Mr Negroponte cited an example in Peru where Intel sales staff tried to persuade the country's vice-minister of education, Oscar Becerra Tresierra, to buy the Intel Classmate PC."
Re:Negroponte (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Negroponte (Score:5, Insightful)
If Intel cared about the kids and not their profits
Re:Negroponte (Score:2, Insightful)
Even with a "humanitarian" purpose, OLPC has to be aware of threats to its overall business sustainability
Re:Negroponte (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he wants kids to have good laptops and good educational materials. The Intel Classmate PC does not qualify on either count!
Re:Negroponte (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that Negroponte has an ego (but everyone is seizing on the fact the man DOES have a big ego...)
but that Intel didn't live up to it's promises. If the stunt in Peru is provable, then Intel DOES have
a big bit of explaining to do- and what Negroponte has been saying isn't QUITE the "hogwash" they're
claiming it is.
It's not that he doesn't want laptops in the hands of kids. He wants education TOOLS in the hands of
kids. Unfortunately, all the Classmate devices seem to be is indoctrination tools for Microsoft products
as opposed to engines to be re-worked, etc. to teach thinking in addition to knowledge. OLPC's goal is
that. All the Classmate seems to be is discounted Windows stuff for kids and calling it "education".
I've a problem with that.
Re:Negroponte (Score:4, Insightful)
Think of the children? (Score:2, Insightful)
Total Lack of Ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a big black mark against Intel and should serve as a warning to future partners that they can't be trusted at all. I mean you can't get much worse publicity than "deliberately sabotaged a charitable organization". Maybe the CEO of Intel would like follow it up by kicking puppies and eating babies?
Re:Negroponte (Score:5, Insightful)
Non-profits and for-profits are more alike than people think. If a non-profit doesn't pay the electricity bills, the lights go off. If a non-profit program doesn't reach sufficient volume, its unit costs go through the roof because of the fixed costs are amortized over fewer units. Just like a for-profit.
The difference between non-profits and for-profits is why they do what they do, not how.
If there are 270,000 children who need laptops in Peru, a non-profit would try to equip as many of them as humanly possible. A for-profit will try to equip the number of children which would maximize its profits. For example, suppose Intel's profits are maximized by equipping 135,000 children in Peru. The government would buy more if the price were lower, but Intel's profit margin would be lower. Intel could increase its unit margin so that it made more on each PC, but Peru would buy sufficiently fewer that the net profits would decrease.
The difference between a non-profit and a for-profit is that a for-profit never considers costs that are external to itself, such as the cost of 135,000 children who grow up without access to information and the world economy. A non-profit internalizes as much of that cost as possible.
When two for-profits compete, they try to poach the plum contracts from each other, and it doesn't matter. They both act in exactly the same way, so the differences between the two are small. When either looks at a population of 270,000 customers, 135,000 of which don't have enough money to play, they see a market of 135,000, give or take a few, plus 135,000 non-entities who they have no intention of serving. When they compete with each other, the more efficient of the two might equip 140,000, and the less efficient might equip 120,000, and so market efficiencies maximize the public benefit, if the only choice is between two entities that weigh the public benefit in exactly the same manner.
When a for-profit cherry picks the plum contracts from a non-profit, it's a different matter altogether. The efficient for profit equips 140,000 where the non-profit would equip 270,000. What's more the non-profit can't pick up the slack, because (a) there's no money and (b) they are amortizing their costs over fewer units so they can no longer provide product at lower prices than the for-profit.
Right or wrong? You decide. But it's certainly about more than personal ego. It's about educating students whom it is not profitable to equip; and if it is not profitable, it will never happen.
Intel's Business Code of Conduct (Score:4, Insightful)
Negroponte has a right to be upset. Intel shouldn't have been doing this against ANY competitor, must less one that they were cooperating with.
Re:Negroponte (Score:5, Insightful)
It signed agreements with OLPC, so it has a responsibility to live up to that. "Maximising profits for shareholders" does not make it okay to break contracts, lie, cheat or steal, despite what many MBAs seem to think.
Re:Is there a hidden 3rd party? (Score:5, Insightful)
The connections in this and other cases are pretty obvious for even the lay person to see. Further, it has been demonstrated that Microsoft knows no shame nor boundaries in their efforts to buy, push or influence governments and other businesses to do their bidding.
If you've got a dog that has been historically pooping on your carpet and you come home today and find poop on your carpet, you're going to look for the dog!
If I did something like that, I would be fired (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were to try and sell against a signed order, I would be fired. Immediately. With no chance of appeal.
Encouraging a customer to break a signed contract could get both the customer and my company sued by the competitor for contract interference, and rightly so.
SirWired
Re:Negroponte (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Negroponte (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is sheer stupidity! Learning Windows is not what children need to compete in the global job market. A good education is what they need. Something that Negroponte, the educator, and Papert, the master behind the scenes who has devoted his life to studying how children learn, understand a bit better than Intel's sales flacks.
Re:Negroponte (Score:5, Insightful)
A corporation's actions are dictated by the weakest morals of it's leaders.
Corollary: The simplest way to make a corporation good is to have a strong ethical leader. I guarantee that the leaders involved in working with OLPC are honest people. I also guarantee the leaders involved in knee-capping OLPC are dishonest. A strong leader would find one personality for the company, and enforce it on the troops. Weak leaders allow multiple personalities to come forward when convenient.
Remember what OLPC is! (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea is to improve education in poorer countries, and the laptops are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Intel's laptop sabotages the OLPC goal because it is a laptop project, not an education project. Remember that the OLPC comes with education based software and even has a "show me the code" button not to mention a screen which is very suitable for reading electronic books. They are carefully designed for education. Intel's laptops aren't. Therefore, competing with OLPC sabotages the goal of better education for poorer people.
Oh, and just to cover the other point, no, you can't eat a laptop, but that's not their purpose: they are not disaster relief tools either, they're education tools.
Re:Negroponte (Score:5, Insightful)
OLPC laptops are more open, more free, better designed, and less expensive. Intel ClassMate PC's are proprietary, less rugged, and require more power to operate. Worst of all they are for-profit, and those profits are sent to Intel stock holders, making wealthy business men wealthier at the expense of money which would better be used satisfying an educational need in the exact same arena as the laptop was advertised as intending to assist. They unnecessarily drain valuable resources from the very market they are pretending to aid.
Basically this is about as disgustingly slimy as I think they are able to be.
Intel invested heavily -- big stakes (Score:4, Insightful)
Very telling indeed, but not in the way he intends it. He's basically saying they have high stakes in this market and, being a corporation, they expect a return on this investment.
He's basically giving away the motive for Intel to do such rotten things to the OLPC project.
Re:Negroponte (Score:4, Insightful)
What about innovative features that the XO embodies? The sunlight readable screen, the tablet like e-book mode, the ultra low power capabilities, the mesh networking? Admittedly, you could argue that the mesh networking is as much software as hardware, but the hardware is a part of it.
In addition, is the Classmate as rugged as the XO?
I don't think just adding Sugar to the Classmate would match up. I submit that despite the higher specs on CPU speed, RAM, and storage, the Classmate hardware represents inferior hardware for the stated purpose as compared to the XO. Those specs are not very significant to the mission that both these units claim to aim at. The hardware advantages that the XO brings to the table *do* make a difference to that mission.
And it wouldn't be easy to save a ton of money by dropping Windows. MS is deathly afraid of non-MS OSes taking hold in the developing world -- they are offering Windows in that market at $3 a pop.
Re:Go Apple! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is there a hidden 3rd party? (Score:4, Insightful)
Comparing the OLPC to low priced laptops is an apples and oranges comparison. You are comparing an educational device for kids to a general purpose computing device with no specific user in mind. They just aren't comparable.
Re:Intel and MS (Score:3, Insightful)
They didn't make it for you (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Negroponte (Score:3, Insightful)
Intel should not have signed a non-compete agreement then.
It might be ok if they were just cold-calling countries.
It is a little shady if they try negotiating with countries which they already know OLPC is negotiating with.
It is downright unethical for them to go and ask countries to break their contract for OLPC's to get an Intel product.
It is pretty sleazy for Intel to figure that there is more profit here than potential fallout over doing it.
Move on. (Score:3, Insightful)
Negroponte would do well to put the Intel relationship behind him. This is turning into a "he said v. they said" argument.
Of course, Negroponte could use these tactics to generate more buzz for OLPC at Intel's expense (regardless if it is actually true).
I'm not saying which side is right. I am saying Negroponte needs to move on... Jesus, how many more of these OLPC v Intel stories do there need to be?
Re:They didn't make it for you (Score:3, Insightful)
It may not matter. The Sugar UI is an adequate application (sorry, "activity") launcher and the applications themselves are individually good.
There were many valid reasons for building a completely new UI from the ground up, and many of the unfamiliar and "different" ways of doing things are the result of an attempt to meet different needs, and originality.
Still, the implementation is currently a mess and simply does not achieve the visions articulated in the style guide.
For example, "recoverability" is explicitly enunciated as a key design principle, yet there is no "undo" function in most contexts, as far as I could tell, anyway. (For example, if you delete a Journal entry, it's gone).
The idea of the Journal and dispensing with hierarchies sounds good in principle, but in practice I certainly have trouble finding stuff. It appears to be necessary to type in tags and descriptions if you want to be able to find them with the Search feature.
The OLPC documentation tapdances around this by saying that "fortunately" describing things is a natural activity for children. Fine, but does this mean it is natural for a seven-year-old to type in descriptions into Journal fields?
One of the highly touted features of the XO is its ability to display the source code for all of its own programs ("activities.") It doesn't work. The button (actually a key combination, CTRL-U or FN-Space (FN-Gear-key)) does nothing.
Re:Intel's Business Code of Conduct (Score:3, Insightful)
Customers of companies like WalMart and Intel don't do it anywhere near enough.