Just a few days ago when OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen announced her departure, optimists were still hopeful that Nicholas Negroponte will turn the things around in no time; after all it all is for a good cause. But just a few days before mass production begin when Intel announced it’s puling the plug on its dealings with Nicholas Negroponte’s brainchild’ things are not looking good at all for OLPC.

When Intel joined OLPC’s educational programme last July, the aim was to combine two major attempts at providing low-cost laptops for the sake of delivering global progress. Intel left the partnership end of last week, giving reasons of “impossible to reconcile” differences between the organisations, as well as accusing OLPC of demanding that Intel end its supply of the Classmate PC, which is part of Intel’s World Ahead programme.

Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC chairman, said

Intel issued a statement to the press behind our backs while simultaneously asking us to work on a joint statement with them.

Intel had not responded to OLPC’s accusations at the time of going to press. Or maybe they have nothing left to say!

OLPC said the differences between the two organisations were that

we view the children as a mission; Intel views them as a market.

OLPC still has companies such as AMD, News Corp, Google, Red Hat offering support to the XO (There is a news Microsoft might get on board as well), so it probably won’t suffer from the withdrawal of what funding Intel was providing; however Intel’s the Classmate might be more successful and pose threat to XO laptop as they got the resources and technology.

So in the end it’s all about PR and market share. But for third world country, people won’t bother who manufacture those laptops as long as the price doesn’t rip off their head.