I recently noted in a Newsbytes column that Portugal was buying half a million Intel Classmate PCs, to be assembled locally under the Magellan name, at a subsidised price of €50 (£39.50) each. Now "The Venezuelan government has signed an agreement with Portugal that will bring 1 million low-cost notebooks, which are based on the Intel Classmate PC design, to the South American country," reports eWeek.
However, while Venezuela is a win for Intel, it's a loss for Microsoft, possibly thanks to Hugo Chavez. The story says:
One noteworthy difference between the notebooks in Portugal and Venezuela is the operating system. While the Portuguese laptops use a modified version of Microsoft Windows, the government of Venezuela decided to use a version of Linux developed in that country.
The Classmate PC is a reference design, and has been adopted or varied by a lot of different manufacturers. I first blogged it here in October 2006. Since then, Intel has updated the design based on tests in 35 countries and its own ethnographic research (above). It now has touch screen functionality just like Bill Gates's beloved Tablet PC.
Although people have tried to take computing to third world countries before, the Classmate looked like a response to the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) machine. However, OLPC has failed to make the big government sales once predicted, and struggled. Classmate PC was successful in helping to kickstart the netbook market, while also making few sales. The Portugal and Venezuela deals are examples.
It's not clear whether anyone else will buy a Classmate PC, ever. But it's a start.