The revolutionary who aims to free the poor with laptops

Nicholas Negroponte had a dream of 'liberating the developing world with laptops'. He created his company, One Laptop Per Child, to achieve his dream. But he didn't count on how much opposition he would encounter from commercial interests.

Nicholas Negroponte brilliant mind, networker extraordinaire, digital prophet is used to having people take notice of what he says. So when he unveiled a strange, tent-like object at Davos in 2005, proclaiming it would change the world for just $100, he expected action. The device was a solar-powered laptop, which Negroponte aimed to distribute to millions of children in the developing world. "The great, the good, the rich and the technocrats nodded in approval," says Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times Magazine. "And then some of them tried to kill it."

The two biggest culprits were Microsoft and Intel, the PC industry giants whose interests were threatened by a cheap machine, using chips made by Intel's rival AMD and an open-source (ie, free) operating system called Sugar. Microsoft "tried to kill it with words", claims Appleyard; Intel, he alleges, "with dirty tricks". Having joined the board of Negroponte's non-profit company, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), it performed an about-turn and launched a spoiler of its own. Three years on, Negroponte's laptop, the XO, no longer resembles a tent, although it costs nearly twice as much and a mere 600,000 are in use, or on order. But it is still clinging to life (see below). "I had wildly underestimated the degree to which commercial entities will go to disrupt a humanitarian project," says Negroponte.

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