One Laptop per Child vs. Intel Classmate

Observing the recent competitive efforts by Intel to preempt OLPC from monopolizing the market of low cost laptops was interesting.

Assuming that the OLPC, which is open source and user-serviceable, does not abide by the Sirious Cybernetics Corporation modus operandi of concealing the fundamental design flaws by superficial design flaws, it does have the potential of creating native hand-on knowledge of technology and applications by people and for the people.

Connectivity and ease of use for start-up applications is important. When I look back at my own budding relationship with PCs, gaming was the raison d' etre of computing and nothing extravagant at that. It was my father's insistence to push for programming skills that allowed my 14-year old self to get a rudimentary grasp of programming. Yet, I did not create anything useful then - programming everything from scratch was hard work with Turbo Pascal. But a well designed object-oriented with large module libraries basic programming environment, who knows? The second reason for the underutilization of this 8086 computing power was its inability to communicate to other machines and devices... They seem to have this designed in for OLPC.

So the Intels and Microsofts dislike open source as revenue potential is minimal and hence a the subversion of OLPC. Intel's faster but more expensive laptop and Microsoft's $1 OS and Office Suite licenses aim to prevent the creation of a generation of unix users.

Interesting to see how this plays out. The governments seem to align with the known utility (if you are generous) of an existing software/hardware proprietary platform vs. the uncertain productivity gains of creating literate and empowered computer experts. Questions to be considered: how successful can this self-learning be? Does it require other types of resource inputs in these societies?