Wall Street Journal: OLPC "stomped by tech giants"?

Updated 24/11/2007; 26/11/2007.

Interesting and complex piece by Steve Stecklow and James Bandler, who assert in the 24/11/2007 Wall Street Journal that demand for the One Laptop Per Child laptop has been far lower than originally hoped, with, so far, only Uruguay solidly committed to it, and Libya apparently switching from OLPC to Intel's Windows-based Classmate. Stecklow and Bandler imply that Intel, which normally makes chips not devices, is actively seeking to stifle the OLPC laptop with the Classmate partly because the OLPC processor is supplied by AMD, its only competitor in the chip market. Meanwhile, the give one get one programme has been extended to 31/12/2007, "thanks to a growing interest in the program", which is reported to have taken 45,000 orders in its first 9 days of operation.

[24/11/2007 addendum prompted by Wayan's comment below.] For a detailed discussion of the WSJ article, with plenty of comments, see Wayan's piece in OLPC News. [26/11/2007] Further details of the scale of demand under Give One Get One, see ZDNET's How do we guage success: will 490,000 units do?.

Comments

[Wayan @ OLPC News]

When Negroponte called it the "$100 laptop" and said he would be selling 10 million laptops per year, he stepped right into every computer manufacturer's competitive landscape, no matter the aims of his organization.

And yet, I do believe that OLPC can still succeed: http://www.olpcnews.com/commentary/press/wall_street_journal_olpc_intel_microsoft.html