OLPC: what went wrong?
By Stuart Turton
Posted on 13 Nov 2009 at 11:51
“The first one piqued people’s curiosity, but with netbooks taking off it wasn’t a trick OLPC could pull off twice,” said Ovum analyst Laurent Lachal. “It was a machine aimed at kids, and that didn’t translate well to the West where we’ve already seen a lot of what it was offering before.”
The failure of the scheme convinced Negroponte that the XO, which was based on open-source software, needed mass-market appeal, and so formed an association with Microsoft that would ultimately trigger the departure of director of software Walter Bender and director of security Ivan Krstic.
“In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops,” Krstic said. “He’s told me so. In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there.”
The problem with this strategy, according to Krstic, is that the XO isn’t a particularly well-built piece of hardware. “We wound up with a keyboard whose keys get stuck. A dual-mode touchpad, capacitive and resistive, where one mode doesn’t work at all. We had board engineering issues, a custom display controller chip that was incomplete in some regards, and completely broken in others.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Walter Bender who left One Laptop Per Child to focus on Sugar, the learning platform he created for the XO. He believes the foundation’s focus on shifting hardware with proprietary software, rather than using the project as a way to foster education, only served to accentuate the XO’s technical failings.We had board engineering issues, a custom display controller chip that was incomplete in some regards, and completely broken in others
“The netbook market was taking off and there was [now] no reason not to get Sugar into the hands of any child, regardless of the hardware to which they had access,” said Bender. “An exclusive arrangement with OLPC would have been counterproductive.”
We tried to contact Nicholas Negroponte to get his view, but he was impossible to pin down. However, de Brouwer was more forthcoming, and while he admits OLPC has had to alter its initial vision, he denies that it’s no longer an education project.
“We’re starting a big project in Mali, where there are 10,000 kids with nothing,” he said. “We’re not just selling them a laptop, together with the Government we’ve electrified the schools; we see that teachers are trained and that classes go down from 100 kids to 40. It’s a laptop project and an education project, but it’s becoming a transformation project, because the aim is to transform a society.”
Transforming the fortunes of OLPC will be a far stiffer challenge.
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Wouldn't it be more sensible to sort out clean water and proper food distribution before giving people laptops? Forgive my cynicism but the biggest hindrance to the third world is corruption and ignorance.
By bubbles16 on 13 Nov 2009 
Intel is to blame here - they screwed this up!
Intel worked briefly with OLPC and split when they couldn't remove AMD from the project. Intel muscled into the same markets where OLPC was being distributed and used the same underhand techniques as they had done previously with AMD, so they could launch their classmate to rival any AMD machine.
@bubbles TBH Giving these people the chance to find out and teach themselves from the internet would be far cheaper than sorting out the water and food - we've tried that approach for generations and it hasn't worked. This approach is to simply give them an educational understanding of how things are done so they can build and do what, how and when ever they want.
By nicomo on 13 Nov 2009
The big problem with this whole project is that you had too many people wading in from stupid angles who had little understanding of the needs of the end user. You had people blundering treating a third world educational tool as if it were a developed world consumer product, trying to get as many features as possible on to what was supposed ot be a basic machine. They wanted a faster proccessor, more hard disc space, and there were even idiots suggesting that it should play HD movies on it. When what was really needed was a low spec machine that could take the place of a text book and which would run on next to no batteries.
The whole thing finally fell apart when the big name companies realized that the end product wouldn't sell well to Western consumers, whom they were hoping would turn a non-profit product into a money spinner.
By Perfectblue97 on 13 Nov 2009
Five what?
Five million pound target? Five million machines, I guess you mean.
And yes, I agree with the first poster. Let's sort out clean water, food, corruption (sleaze, surely?) and healthcare before we give them laptops.
By Grace_Quirrel on 13 Nov 2009
OLPC - It is already flawed
The truth is that the concept behind OLPC -One Laptop Per Child is that, amongst other things, not every child will need, or should have a laptop. What about a family PC or sharing, or even my favourite, those who want a laptop can get themselves one, and those in poorer countries, well, why do they even need laptops now.
Trust me,
What happened to desktops anyway?
By AfCurtis on 13 Nov 2009
Are ALL large IT projects doomed to failure?
Think how many government IT projects in the UK turn out to be une oreille du cochon. Usually because the intended users are not properly consulted before, the requirements definitions turn out to have movable goalposts, and there are too many vested interests to reconcile. One-per-Desk, sorry, One Laptop per Child seems to have been cast in the same mould...
By JohnGray7581 on 14 Nov 2009
almost too inaccurate to comment
OLPC is one of the most successful projects in computers and learning, with over 1.2M laptops in the hands of kids in 31 countries and 19 languages. 800,000 headed their way. http://www.flickr.com/photos/olpc/3145038187/
You can thank us for the downward price pressure on the laptop industry, not to mention the fact that OLPC is the birthplace of the Netbook, soon to be 30% of the world market. Instead, you quote an employee that was dismissed for bad performance (Ivan). When you ask if kids should get "connected laptops" substitute the word "education" and you will never ask that silly question again. When we go to places like Afghanistan, Haiti and most recently Gaza, the project is about hope, as well. OLPC has changed the lives of so many. A shame you cannot look beyond sales, which are meaningless to us (we do not take a penny of nmargin), as we are a non-profit, humanistarian program. Imagine if I had said in 2005 that we were doing 100,000 or 500,000 laptops. It would not have created any attention nor the subsequent disruption nor real change. Look deeper next time.
NN
By NicholasNegroponte on 15 Nov 2009
Goodwill for the project had also been eroded by Negroponte’s mud-slinging
If the previous post is by the suggested author, it appears that your article comment is true. Mr Negroponte obvioiusly has had a humility bypass.
By milliganp on 16 Nov 2009
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