IP Democracy: Microsoft verus Negroponte

The New York Times’ John Markoff has an interesting piece today about Microsoft’s opposition to MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte’s plan to bring $100 laptop computers to the developing world. Negroponte didn’t seal a deal with Microsoft to include the Redmond giant’s software in the low-cost devices and opted for open source software as a consequence.

Now Microsoft is talking down Negroponte’s plans and is advocating instead a new idea which the company says is better and cheaper: cellphones configured to access the Internet. But the big-time opposition isn’t stopping Negroponte who revealed at the World Economic Forum in Davos manufacturing and financing deals for his idea.

This has not deterred Mr. Negroponte. At a private breakfast meeting on the digital divide at the forum on Saturday, Mr. Negroponte said that he had a commitment from Quanta Computer of Taiwan [which already manufactures about one-third of the world’s laptops] to manufacture the portable computers, which would initially use a processing chip from Advanced Micro Devices of Sunnyvale, Calif. He also said he had raised $20 million to pay for engineering and was close to a final commitment of $700 million from seven nations — Thailand, Egypt, Nigeria, India, China, Brazil and Argentina — to purchase seven million of the laptops.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on January 30, 2006 8:22 AM to IP Democracy