Competing Products are Competition

There's been some noise on programming.reddit.com recently about a Wall Street Journal story describing how Intel and Microsoft are apparently crushing the OLPC laptop.  According to the WSJ article, Microsoft and Intel have been working together to sell low-priced laptops running standard Windows technologies to developing countries at prices that make them competitive with Mr. Negroponte's OLPC laptop initiative.

The article quotes Mr. Negroponte as claiming that Intel was attempting to "undermine" his initiative, and saying that he didn't want to compete in "bake-offs" with Intel's machine.  I'm a bit confused by this.  While it's all well and good that Mr. Negroponte's company is non-profit, it doesn't magically mean that their products don't compete with Intel's.  In fact, if you read the description of the machine, which is based on AMD processors and an operating system using the Linux kernel, it would seem to be designed precisely to avoid Intel and Microsoft's dominance in the US market.  It seems no more remarkable that Intel and Microsoft consider this competition as that IBM's competitors disliked their charitably giving computers to all the major engineering schools in the 50s and 60s.

Perhaps most humorous is Mr. Negroponte's assertion, early in the article, that his "goal is not selling laptops" and that he's in the education business.  In that case, it's hard to see why he should be upset that Intel and Microsoft are aiming products at the same market he's reaching with the OLPC; this is only achieving his eventual goal of allowing children in developing countries access to first-world technology.  He claims he's good at selling ideas, not laptops; it seems from here that his ideas have sold.