Exactly two years ago, MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte announced the birth of “One Laptop per Child” (OLPC) program, that through global distribution of cheap and low-power laptops, children from poor countries will received deserved education and exposure to the outside world.

The rule of the game was; worldwide governments place an order of five million units, Laptop to be produced on a grand scale at the cheapest cost, sell it for a hundred dollars each.

As ideal as it was planned, the million-unit orders never materialized. To date, Peru is the only program’s most prominent customer having ordered about 270,000 laptops. Despite the failure to achieve the five million units goal, the laptop, dubbed the XO, went into production anyway, at a cost of about $188 a unit. Along with the production, OLPC launched its “Give 1 Get 1″ drive: With a contribution of $399, the donor will receive a complimentary XO, and a second XO will be donated to a child.

Some observers reckoned the drive a desperate move to pump-in cash into an ‘all-over-the-place” attempt. Intel too separated itself from their enraged partnership with OLPC. With Intel’s initiation to sell its own cheap laptop, the Classmate PC, to governments that had already made provisional commitments to OLPC, OLPC bombarded the leading manufacturer of violation a nondisparagement clause in its contract. Intel claimed clean-handed that the clause bound only the company’s officers, not its sales force.

When asked about the departure of Intel, OLPC’s president for software and content, Walter Bender had a blunt response. Bender argued that that Intel has contributed nothing to the company, thus it’s departure laid no impact at all.

Pic: CNN.com

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