Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT prof, decided to apply C.K.Prahlad's concept of trying to find gems at the bottom of the pyramid. He wanted to reduce parity in education which students get in the developing nations from those who get it in the developed nations. He formed the initiative OLPC or One Laptop Per Child. This was a brilliant effort by Prof Negroponte to work towards removing social iniquity. He got backing from the UN at Davos earlier.
Google stepped in to help as well - of course with money and a desire to sell their platform of SaaS software. Intel stepped in as they didn't want AMD to capture the market. Imagine what kind of market this brings for the vendors. A huge 200 million set of kids who will grow up with all this and eventually get used to it and demand the same thing when they go to work or consume at own expense when they grow up.
Operational difficulties and economics led to his price point going from 100$ to 188$. Volumes earlier estimated weren't there by orders of magnitude. The orders didn't come through. It is a hard-sell in these developing nations for spending 188$ on a kid when his/her entire schooling education can occur on that amount. The quest for capturing the market led Intel to come up with its own 230$-280$ laptop, slightly superior to the OLPC-made laptop.
However, the tech giants stomped the effort - check out this article. Who is to blame? Nicholas says that he is frustrated with the interference from the tech giants and the insidious sinister behavior which threw off his original calculations about the market-size and how much he would be able to capture - a classic business planning mistake by new entrepreneurs - not acknowledging and assessing competition correctly. Forget the tech-giants, the locals in India, Taiwan, etc competed to get a piece of the pie and I bet that Nicholas didn't have them in his business plan. Now, he feels frustrated !
On the other hand, Prof Nicholas expresses that we are not in laptop business. He must actually be happy that either this way or the other way, OLPC's objective must get satisfied - one laptop per child. Intel joined the board of OLPC - saw that these guys didn't know how to run the business the way it should be and decided to run off in their way - nothing wrong in it. Is it incestuous behavior? depends on who is looking at it...
Such contradictory stances by Nicholas probably sends out signals that his ego is hurt due to no success of his initiative. An academic devoting himself to nonprofit efforts must keep a check on his/her ego. I understand that the process of tech-giants muscling him out could have caused agony - but his original purpose was OLPC - he must have that in his mind - he will always be known as the guy who took this brave initiative of reducing the rift between developing nations and developed nations. I would always respect him for that !
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