Computer makers are now taking tiny laptops seriously, due to the success of Taiwan's Asustek and India's HCL. Acer will soon join the frayFor years, many in the PC industry dismissed efforts by a small group of innovators to come up with small laptop computers that would be far more affordable than the traditional notebooks sold by the likes of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL). Nicholas Negroponte, the visionary Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, launched his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation with the goal of creating a $100 machine. But skeptics wrote off Negroponte and OLPC as do-gooders without a real business model who were more interested in providing computers to impoverished kids in African or Asian villages than selling them profitably in developed countries.
Proving the naysayers right, the XO laptop that rolled off the factory line late last year was beautifully designed and loaded with innovative features, but way over its $100 price tag and behind schedule. The XO also met with an underwhelming response from governments in the developing world, and Negroponte is now reorganizing (BusinessWeek.com, 3/5/08) his group.
If OLPC didn't make much business sense, then neither did the low-cost laptop project of Negroponte's main rival, Intel (INTC). Engineers at the semiconductor giant's Shanghai development center were working on the Classmate PC (BusinessWeek, 7/9/07), but it, too, was aimed at children in the world's poor countries.
Read More
