[TriLUG] Anyone catch 60minutes last night concerning the OLPC?

[Israel J. Pattison]

I honestly think the 60 Minutes piece was a calculated marketing tactic for
Negroponte's cause.  I can't believe that a smart fellow like MIT's Nicholas
Negroponte honestly thought he was going to convince world governments to
buy three million laptops while a smart fellow like Craig Barrett sat on his
hands.  If Negroponte honestly thought that he could waltz right in and eat
Intel's lunch he's a few bits short of a byte.

Even if you go back to Negroponte's originial premise -- that the world
needs OLPC because their is a market vacuum for a $100 laptop -- just
creating such a product creates the market.  Furthermore, if Negroponte's
real reason behind OLPC is humanitarian, he shouldn't care how students get
their hands on a $100 laptop.  What is Nick's real motivation here?  Could
it be intellectual property that his MIT lab can use to collect royalties?
The 60 minutes piece did point out several key innovations created by the
OLPC.

Israel

On 5/21/07, Kevin J. <mrkevinj at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Very interesting. I had heard about a low-cost pc from Intel, but didn't
> know what they were called until I saw that piece. I'm not sure how that
> makes Intel evil though. Looks like a smart play on their part. It may be
> "humanitarian", but getting the first jump on a software and hardware
> platform in an entire country is a future goldmine of programmers,
> purchasers, partners, etc. They'd be idiotic not to do that.
>
> They are obviously pushing M$ on their hardware, but I noticed Intel also
> states it will run Linux on the classmate web site. The reality is that it
> will come down to marketing in many of these countries and Nicholas will
> need more people involved in his marketing effort if he hopes to play
> against Intel. Personally, I think this is a crucial effort right now. It
> seems obvious that children respond very favorably to a laptop computer; and
> governments around the world will begin to see the power of this medium (for
> good and bad) as it becomes more widespread. If I had to guess, I'd say that
> M$ will likely lose big in this market in the long run due to the many
> pitfalls of closed source (specifically M$) code; but Intel is smart to get
> their hardware in the fray right now. If AMD had any sense at all, CEO
> Hector Ruiz would be on another plane pushing the OLPC platform with
> Nicholas.
>
> All I really want to know is...when and where can I buy one of these
> things??!
>
> Kevin
>
> Have you F/LOSSed today?
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Mike Shaw <mdshaw89 at gmail.com>
> To: trilug <trilug at trilug.org>
> Sent: Monday, May 21, 2007 4:56:44 PM
> Subject: [TriLUG] Anyone catch 60minutes last night concerning the OLPC?
>
> Looks like Intel is the evil-doer in this story:
>
> http://olpc.tv/2007/05/21/60-minutes/
>
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