100 Laptop

Marketing the “$ 100 Latptop”

Background:

How the concept was born.

* In 1999, Negroponte, MIT Faculty Member, went to a small Cambodian village and gave 20 children laptops with internet connections. He noted how "the children and their families quickly innovate multiple uses for the machines and easily teach themselves to navigate the Internet, soon after this announced his intention of building a lap-top with internet/ multimedia capabilities to make it cost accessible to millions of poor children in emerging countries, the project was known as the “100 USD Laptop”, later became a NPO (P for Profit), named as OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), founded by Negroponte in January 2005, in this same year he presented the idea at the World Economic Forum (UN), where it was well embraced, in contrast with harsh opinions from industry leaders like Intel that called the project the 100 gadget.

* Negroponte gained a lot of momentum as his idea was quickly backed by large corporate partners such as AMD, News Corp., Google, Red Hat, who have OLPC at least 29 million USD to fund the project.

* OLPC worked hard to sell this concept to the world’s education ministers, Negroponte had a good position in terms of influence given his academic background, and governments were more likely to speak with him than with corporation (Microsoft, Intel). OLPC had received orders (but no payment yet) in 2006 for 6 million of computers

* Production for OLPC project had been assured with Quanta, the major manufacturer of laptops globally, which was ready to produce 1 million laptops per month.

* By mid 2007 no commitment had been finalized yet, as the investment was certainly huge and price was only likely to drop if scale in production was achieved, which was not feasible without enough orders.

* In the other, between 2005 and 2007, industry context changed Intel (previously a detractor of the project) launched the Classmate PC (conceptually similar), while HP had...