The Hindu Business Line : Corporate clash over school PC may force other options

A student (left) at the Delhi Public School, Vasundhara, with his Classmate PC, while pre-school children at the Khairat School in Raigadh district, Maharashtra, get the feel of the XO laptop. — Intel; Carlo Gomez Monroy/OLPC

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore, Jan. 6 Last Friday’s public flap over the schools version of the personal computer, and Intel’s announced decision to leave the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative was followed only a day later by more aggro. OLPC founder Prof Nicholas Negroponte accuses Intel of trying to undermine the selling of the non-profit organisation’s school PC platform, called the XO, in some South American markets. Intel on its part said it was not willing to stop selling its own educational PC — the Classmate — merely because it had decided to support OLPC.

Both realisations are similar in key respects: using small liquid crystal displays; eschewing the power-guzzling hard disk drive for solid state Flash-based storage; packaging the PC like a foldable book — and making it rugged and ‘kid proof’. Intel’s Classmate is fuelled (but naturally!) by an Intel processor and by default runs a version of Microsoft’s Windows.

The XO has an AMD chip under the hood and opts for a non-proprietary Linux flavour as its operating system. The Consumer Electronics Show that opens in Las Vegas on Monday (January 7) was widely expected to see Intel showcase an OLPC/XO built around one of its own chips. Now that is unlikely to happen.

Room for everyone

This corporate clash has diverted attention from what should have remained a core objective of all concerned: creating an affordable computing platform, so that the millions of children around the world otherwise deprived of an affordable tool for Internet-fuelled learning and collaboration would be e-nabled. Clearly both organisations have sunk millions into developing their respective versions of a school PC.

Intel’s development was done by its India-based team in Bangalore. Neither can afford the negative impact of the latest disharmony, because potential customers, governments or educational boards in the developing world are now likely to be frightened off into inaction.

This is bad for everyone. Both machines were clever, even ingeniously conceived products — and there is clearly room for everyone.

Home-grown innovation

India has been an interesting testing ground for both Classmate and XO. HCL has already started making the Classmate with know-how from Intel at its Puducherry plant. It has innovated — by deciding to offer a Linux option and tying up with local developers to create appropriate study material.

The OLPC organisation has tried out the XO in a pilot scheme, said to be supported by Reliance Communication, in Khairat-Dhangarwada village in Maharashtra’s Raigadh district. The Indian government has not as yet endorsed either of these initiatives — but its inaction is not just a matter of remaining equidistant: it has neglected to exploit its own offering in this arena: the Mobilis PC created by Encore Software, Bangalore, with help from the CSIR, over two years ago. While the machine — an interesting desktop-laptop hybrid running Linux — is not to be seen in Indian shops, let alone classrooms. Encore has been quietly promoting it in South American educational markets like Brazil, competing with the OLPC.

There is more than one danger from all this delay or dithering: On one hand open market forces will see aggressively priced laptops hit the market soon that will challenge the school machines at least on price: Asus has already launched the eePC in key global markets, a compact model with a 7-inch screen and solid state memory but otherwise a full featured PC. The Indian enterprise-fuelled Aci (Allied Computers International) has also announced a 7-inch laptop for 2008. These could well give specialist school PCs a good run for their money.

Mobile device?

The other danger is the considerable body of opinion building up worldwide which questions the need or rationale of one PC per child in many geographies or cultures.

If you at all want to provide each child with a connected device, they say, look at something like a souped up, wireless enabled iPod — small, compact, does many of the things as a PC and kids seem to love it already. And yes it would be much cheaper.

In any case the mobile phone is already the key information appliance the world over — outselling PCs five to one.

Which way will the winds of change in the educational computing arena blow in 2008? Who knows — but clearly interesting times are ahead.