"Fortune: What's the biggest single reason your partnership with Intel fell apart?
"Negroponte: The biggest single reason was that they were directly selling their Classmate laptop as opposed to having it be a reference design. They're not selling it in this country because they'd be killed by their biggest customers like Dell. But in the developing world they are selling directly. It just set them apart from every single one of our other sponsors [which include AMD, Google, News Corp., Taiwan's Quanta Computer (which builds the XO), and Florida-based distributor Brightstar]. When Intel joined us we thought we could move toward that being a reference design more and more, and less toward them selling the Classmate itself..."
The New York Times: Intel Quits Effort to Get Computers to Children
"A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs.
"Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world’s poorest children..."
