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Friday, January 11, 2008 Laptop Program to Intel: Good RiddanceWalter Bender of One Laptop per Child says that reports of the program's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
In January 2005, MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte announced the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, a utopian attempt to improve education in poor communities through the design and global distribution of cheap, low-power laptops. Eventually, Negroponte said, the laptop would sell for a hundred dollars. The program was conceived on a grand scale: Negroponte initially claimed that the laptop would not go into production until governments worldwide had placed a total of five million orders. But the million-unit orders never materialized. To date, Peru is the program's largest customer by a large margin, having ordered about 270,000 laptops. So in November 2007, the laptop, dubbed the XO, went into production anyway, at a cost of roughly $188 a unit. At about the same time, OLPC began its holiday-season Give 1 Get 1 drive: any donor who contributed $399 to the project would receive a complimentary XO, and a second XO would be sent to a poor community. Some observers considered the drive a desperate attempt to inject cash into a floundering endeavor. Then, last week, Intel walked away from a tempestuous six-month partnership with OLPC, scotching the planned unveiling of an Intel version of the XO at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The main point of contention appears to have been Intel's attempts to sell its own cheap laptop, the Classmate PC, to governments that had already made provisional commitments to OLPC. OLPC claims that Intel violated a nondisparagement clause in its contract; Intel claims that the clause bound only the company's officers, not its sales force. The New York Times greeted the news with a headline announcing "The Demise of One Laptop per Child." Earlier this week, Technology Review senior editor Larry Hardesty sat down with Walter Bender, OLPC's president for software and content, to discuss both Intel's withdrawal and the overall health of the initiative. Technology Review: What effect does Intel's departure have on the program? Walter Bender: Zero. Intel had contributed nothing. They contributed nothing to our current product, the XO. They contributed nothing to our learning models. They contributed nothing to the software. So their going away, so far, is a wash for us. TR: Isn't this just the latest blow to the program? WB: After what? TR: After large contracts not materializing. Originally, wasn't there a minimum requirement for a government order? WB: Originally, there was. We certainly made some mistakes along the way. And one mistake was to be a little bit too rigid in our model. Part of it was just based on some false assumptions on our part in terms of what kind of volume we needed to get things launched. And we thought that going to a few large orders was the best way to jump-start things, to prime the pump. Some of us, our instinct was quite different. And that was to try to get a broad base and try to make this a grassroots, bottom-up launch instead of a top-down launch. Now, it turns out that we have both. And really, what we're after is any good idea. So on the one hand, we actually do have some large orders. Maybe not as large as we had originally hoped for, but we're going to do a quarter of a million laptops just in Peru. And we're doing something on a similar scale in Uruguay. Those are examples of top-down. But then there's a lot of bottom-up. We just did about 100,000 bottom-up machines that we're going to be distributing through the "give" part of the Give 1 Get 1 program. |
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$100 Laptop Program's New President
05/02/2008
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
Wildgorilla on 01/11/2008 at 12:35 AM
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gabrielg01 on 01/11/2008 at 5:15 PM
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zzyzzy on 01/11/2008 at 9:48 AM
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rbulcao on 01/11/2008 at 10:26 AM
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novakar on 01/11/2008 at 4:11 PM
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Several such experts on the economics of the poor on the OLPC board may help. One such resource could be 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus (microloans). His new book out on social business, “Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism” was recently featured on public TV.
See the Charlie Rose PBS interview: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1986204406774837194
gabrielg01 on 01/13/2008 at 3:13 PM
313
The thinking always went along the lines of "If we can only bring them some 'railways', many of their problems will be solved, and then they will be able to take care of themselves."
As time has gone by, the 'railways' in this scheme have been changed to 'telephone lines', 'highways', 'schools', 'hospitals'...and lately to the 'Internet', 'cell phones'...and now to 'laptops'.
What people miss is this: most Americans in the 1950s had a much better quality of life, than most 3rd worlders have today. And the America of the '50s had a lot less technology than the 3rd world has today.
The idealists are missing the 'cause and effect' connection here. It is not the technology that makes a society advanced. It is its values. The technology development is only the result, or the effect, of good civilizational values.
And if you put this in reverse: you can deliver a lot of technology to a bantustan...it will still remain a bantustan.
Lupa on 01/14/2008 at 4:06 AM
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weee on 01/16/2008 at 4:27 AM
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Whatever your views on the OLPC one cannot question the organisations motivation and vision; more than can be said of the likes of Intel and others involved in spoiling manoeuvres.
Sawatdwehba on 11/18/2008 at 5:28 PM
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