As Clayton Christensen would say, the OLPC is an “disruptive innovation”. After some years of sustainable innovation (also a Christensen definition), the big laptop players reach a level of product performance that was aimed to the most attractive customers of the market, those who can afford the complexity of the product and also its higher price. But in the meantime, many people that could not afford neither the complexity nor the price becomes a possible target for a product with lower performance, more simplicity of use and a very lower price. In the laptop industry that moment arrived when some factors were combined at the appropriate time. Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC organization have took advantage of that: lower prices of x86 processors, very lower cost of manufacturing in Asia, lower prices of other components, availabity of open source and the collaboration of the open source community, and some strategic factor that they brought: ex MIT genius and Seymour Pappert in the team, a new model of distribution by dealing directly with the goverments instead of using the tipical channels, among others. This combination is called by Christensen as a “disruptive circumstance”. In this circumstances, entrants are likely to beat the incumbents, says Chistensen in his book The Innovator’s Solution. My opinion is that Intel, after this years of trying to undermine the OLPC project, has recognized this “disruptive circumstance” and has decided to join the OLPC expecting to get some benefits of this disruption, if it is still possible, instead of been defeated by it. This is not the end of the story.

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