The Times Online has a really interesting article up on the One Laptop Per Child initiative and Microsoft’s and Intel’s responses to it. It’s a great read, and provides an interesting window into some of the skulduggery that the corporations engaged in when threatened by the vision of a cheap laptop for the developing world.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2005, Nicholas Negroponte, supreme prophet of digital connectivity, revealed a strange tent-like object. It was designed to change the world and to cost $100. It was a solar-powered laptop. Millions would be distributed to children in the developing world, bringing them connection, education, enlightenment and freedom of information. The great, the good, the rich and the technocrats nodded in solemn approval.

And then some of them tried to kill it.