Phillips vs Matsushita

Individual case report of “Marketing the $100 Laptop” and Philips versus Matsushita: Competing Strategic and Organizational Choices

Marketing the “$100 Laptop”

Summary

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) wants to put available laptops at $100 USD to poor children around the world. They want to create a rugged computer to help kids learn and play between them in small connected villages in dust and challenged environments. As the goal of 5 million orders, some competitors are moving in the same market of low cost laptops. Being the OLPC a non-profit organization, they are working with governments to get them engaged on the initiative and to get the orders from them, however, this have been a political and bureaucracy issue. The process of the XO laptop from concept to life is turning out to be more complicated than originally planned by Negroponte in 2003.

Main issues encountered by OLPC and their XO project

The issue ranges from Marketing, Supply and production systems and Design and concepts.

Even computer is designed for kids; the main customers will be governments. The receiving countries have not classrooms, energy, communication and infrastructure, all which need to be incorporated in the design and in the open software design.

In order to get lower cost, they worked with hundreds of suppliers, each of them being the lowest cost for specific components. Deal with more than 800 different parts around the world can be complex. They created a forum to discuss design alternatives that can result in lower cost and time to introduce, but also lead to a lack of intellectual properties as well provide information to competitors. In the software and application design, the laptop needed to be created thinking of the lack of training of the teachers, children and governments in emerging markets.

One main issues was how to convince governments that technology will increase education and alleviate suffering, poor is not only about not eating or have...