WHEN a plan to create a $100 laptop was announced three years ago at the World Economic Forum, it seemed like a stroke of genius. Here was an opportunity for the global business elite gathered in Davos to show they had a heart, and to do so in a genuinely useful way — by developing a cheap way to bridge the digital divide and extend the benefits of the IT revolution to millions of children in the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT professor who came up with the idea, was celebrated (once again) as a visionary.

Today, everything looks a lot messier. Not for the first time, Mr Negroponte has found himself at war with a giant of the computer industry, Intel, which last week quit the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) consortium that is making the education-oriented laptop, called the XO.