A scant six months after Intel received acclaim for boarding the OLPC train, they’ve jumped off at the nearest stop. The story is a mixed-bag of finger-pointing, as any good Silicon Valley blamefest is, but it appears that Intel has moved on to plunge back into the development of its low-cost Classmate PC. Agnes Kwan, Intel rep, said in part:
We have said for a long time that we don’t believe there will be one single solution…There are some basic fundamental differences in our approaches.
On the flip side, it seems that the OLPC project asked Intel to stop delivering chips to any low-cost manufacturer of laptops, such as Asus with the Eee PC.
In response, OLPC has blasted back saying that Intel’s efforts to build an XO Laptop based on Intel chippery was “Seemingly half-hearted.” Furthermore, OLPC President Walter Bender said:
My expectation was that there’s lots of room for cooperation, particularly on software … [but] I couldn’t get Intel interested in helping me with any of those problems.
And added that Intel primarily seemed interested for marketing and PR reasons. We’ll keep you apprised.
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