The Battle Continues

2008

OLPC launches their first 100 dollars laptop project in China, by offering local governments of poor areas in Tsinghai province, which locates in the west part of China, with 10,000 laptops, for experimental purpose. Further more, 100 trained volunteers are sent to these mountain areas to cultivate local teaching forces, and this project is highly welcomed by local teachers, children and their families.

Meanwhile, this project also arouses Microsoft and Intel’s concern. Starting from their long term security and strategy and being afraid of rising of new GNU/LINUX forces and their powerful impact on the next generation, AMD’s advertising power; they determine to begin their own research on new low-cost desktop computers to fight against OLPC, supported by Open Sources software and AMD.

The poor countries in Africa also notice the importance of this project and wait for it results.

2010

Microsoft and Intel also develop successfully a new kind of low cost of laptop which sells around $140, and named MiLaptop, with Windows operation system, Microsoft Office suite and Intel CPU. Although this product is not manufactured, however, they are highly advocated in global trade fair and recommended to poor countries either.

2012

With the concern of the success of the experiment four years ago in poor areas of Tsinghai province two years ago and the increasing obviousness of globalization trend, the central government of China orders another 100,000 laptops for the poor areas in Tsinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan and Tibet province. And another over 1,000 pre-trained teachers, volunteers and specialists are sent to those areas. Meanwhile, network infrastructures weaving are also started. The previous success experiences are not only introduced to these new areas but other developing countries which are observing.

2015

Over one third of target developing countries are interested in such projects and half of them would like to user OLPC products and other part are attracted by MiLaptop, because of their mainstream operating system and office software. Even through OLPC are cheaper, due to its relatively hard-to-use features and limited functions, and especially the commercial attack from Microsoft, OLPC’s market share is only 50%.

2017

Thanks to the rise of UI and human interaction design in Open Sources software, the usability of OLPC is not that hard-to-use anymore. And the Open Source software tides also influence the whole world. Realizing the latest trend and price advantage, more and more countries choose OLPC and OLPC market share raises about 10%.

However, the battle between Microsoft and OLPC is not finished yet. And the future is quite clear: More and more kids in developing countries are equipped with IT technologies. And they split into Open Source group and Microsoft group. After they grow up, the servers implemented are also mixed with Linux, UNIX and Microsoft’s, the collapsing of monopolization of Microsoft begins to fall down, starting from the kids in developing countries.

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