What's Intel's purpose here? [LWN.net]

What's Intel's purpose here?

Posted Mar 31, 2007 18:27 UTC (Sat) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510)
Parent article: Mandriva participates in Intel's Classmate PC project

So, Intel has positioned itself against the OLPC project for some time, with a number of public statements. I thought it might be something they were doing for Microsoft, but then they come out with a competing model that has Mandriva in it rather than Windows. It costs more. Is it just that they don't like OLPC using AMD Geode for its CPU? Not that this is a high-margin market where they can expect to make significant money.

It doesn't make business sense.

Bruce

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What's Intel's purpose here?

Posted Apr 1, 2007 4:25 UTC (Sun) by djabsolut (guest, #12799) [Link]

It doesn't make business sense.

From a marketing point of view it works. People in wealthy countries are more likely to get a "warm fuzzy feeling" buying a desktop PC that uses components from a company which is has a project to help out the 3rd world. (In effect they're indirectly helping OLPC by bringing more credence to the low-cost laptop idea.)

Poor Microsoft

Posted Apr 1, 2007 7:59 UTC (Sun) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

Yes, interesting, isn't it? Yet another blow for Microsoft. Maybe time for them to do their own platform-for-schools project...

Poor Microsoft

Posted Apr 1, 2007 13:26 UTC (Sun) by bluegecko (guest, #42312) [Link]

Not quite... Intel's blurb states that the Classmate will run either Windows or Linux

Poor Microsoft

Posted Apr 2, 2007 2:09 UTC (Mon) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

Thanks for that link.

Hmmm ... it mentions something called "Win XPE". Wonder what that is? Sounds like it's XP-based, rather than Vista-based.

Also no mention of what the difference in price might between the Dimdows version and the Linux version.

Poor Microsoft

Posted Apr 5, 2007 17:40 UTC (Thu) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Windows XP Embedded -- presumably they haven't had time to strip out the inessential components from Vista, and besides, if even corporate users with in-house IT staff shy away from new OS releases for at least a few months, it makes even more sense to be cautious for this sort of mass deployments.