Wednesday-Night

11 June 2008
65,000 computers for Colombian schoolchildren (Full text in Spanish only)
An agreement signed between Colombia and the OLPC Foundation will provide 65,000 schoolchildren with laptops.
4 January 2008
It grieves us to see The Economist’s review of one of our favorite development projects, but we take heart in the conclusion that “Mr. Negroponte’s vision for a $100 laptop was not the right computer, only the right price. Like many pioneers, he laid a path for others to follow.”

One clunky laptop per child
From Economist.com
Great idea. Shame about the mediocre computer
IT WOULD be a stunt, but one perhaps worth performing, to write this column on the tiny, green and white, $200 XO computer from One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) that sits idle before your columnist. Alas, he cannot.
This is not because the keys are too small for his adult hands (though they are), or because the processor’s slow speed makes the machine frustrating to use(though it does). Nor is it because the track pad sometimes goes screwy and the keys lack the normal pressed-key response that allows smooth typing. It isn’t even because moving the column from the word-processing application to the web-mail system is prohibitively difficult.
Instead, it is because the XO, which your columnist has explored since it arrived a few days before Christmas, has bugs that cause occasional crashes. A discreet message sometimes flashes when the system boots up, warning of some sort of data-check error. This, along with the host of other hiccups, necessitated the use of an ordinary, expensive computer for this column.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When Nicholas Negroponte, a tech guru at the celebrated Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, launched the initiative in 2005, the vision was grandiose, but the implementation seemed beguilingly simple. Computer-processing technology had become so widespread and inexpensive that DVD players and mobile phones had as much power as the PCs of just a few years ago. Just add a screen and keyboard, the thought went, and you’ll have a cheap, functional laptop.
Indeed, Mr Negroponte’s vision was brilliant. He planned to blanket the developing world with tens of millions of $100 laptops for kids. The low cost would come from a tripartite “perfect storm”. First, economies of scale: sales would be directly to governments, who could only buy quantities above 1m. Second, the machines would bypass Intel’s processors and Microsoft’s software in favour of open-source stuff. Third, commodity parts would keep the price low.
Mr Negroponte sought funding from education ministries: “It’s an education project, not a technology project,” he was fond of saying. Faced with critics who argued he should concentrate on the classic development issues that keep people poor and sick rather than doling out high-tech gear, Mr Negroponte would rightly reply that education through computers can help resolve all such problems.
Today that optimism seems Pollyannaish. Many governments (including Nigeria’s and Libya’s) cancelled their informal commitments to purchase the machines when they realised the devices were untried, the price higher than envisaged and other cheap laptops available.
A few trials in places like Haiti and Rwanda, together with orders from Peru and Uruguay collectively fell far short of even 1m machines. A clever holiday promotion in North America that offered two laptops—one for the buyer and one to donate to a child in a developing country—for $399 similarly fizzled. Production lines at Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese manufacturer, were left idle.
All this is a shame, not least because Mr Negroponte’s idea was sound and the machines’ hardware, at least on paper, impressive. The initiative inspired several advances in laptop technology, in terms of features (flash memory instead of a spinning hard-drive), design (a laptop-to-tablet form and a waterproof keyboard) and price reductions. A pull-cord hand-generator for power is in the works. OLPC and their boosters deserve hearty congratulations for all of this. Unfortunately, OLPC’s problems, which can be distilled into four main areas, risk turning a wonderful idea into a plastic paperweight.
First, the implementation of the technologies is terrible. In their zeal to rewrite the rules of computing for first-time users, OLPC shipped machines with a cumbersome operating system. For example, adding Flash to do something like watch a YouTube video requires users to go into a terminal line-code and type a long internet address to download the software: it seems impossible to cut-and-paste the address. Major PC vendors spend millions in research and development to enhance a computer’s usability; OLPC tried to reinvent the wheel and came up with an oval.
Second, the go-to-market execution (as it’s called in the industry) was imperfect. There was a lack of documentation, support and methods to integrate the PCs into school curricula, teacher training, and the like. OLPC seemed to think that just by handing out laptops, everything would sort itself out. This columnist happens rather to like that gung-ho approach, yet also recognises that the consumer is not the nine-year-old user with infinite time on her hands, but a government bureaucrat who has to evaluate the machines relative to the other options.
That leads to the third problem. Since the project launched in 2005, commercial rivals have emerged: Intel’s “Classmate” at around $250; Acer’s laptop at $350; Everex PCs with Zonbu software at around $280; Asustek Computer’s Asus Eee at under $400; and an Indian competitor, Novatium Solutions, which created a basic “NetPC” for around $80. There are many more.
OLPC initially treated all these activities as threats rather than competitors. Lately, Intel has supported OLPC, though this week said it would leave its board, and Microsoft is trying to tweak Windows XP, an earlier operating system, to work on the XO. But all computer buyers will have to compare the XP to a lot of other products in the market—something that never seemed to have struck OLPC’s staffers as a possibility, but should have.
This leads to the final problem that has done the most to disappoint OLPC’s fans: the hubris, arrogance and occasional self-righteousness of OLPC workers. They treated all criticism as enemy fire to be deflected and quashed rather than considered and possibly taken on board. Overcoming this will be essential if the project is to succeed past its first release. Technology products improve based on user feedback. The OLPC staff will need to learn to listen to the candid criticism of outsiders for the second-generation of the laptop—or they do not deserve to build one.
Ultimately the OLPC initiative will be remembered less for what it produced than the products it spawned. The initiative is like running the four-minute mile: no one could do it, until someone actually did it. Then many people did.
Likewise, an inexpensive laptop seemed impossible until Mr Negroponte and the OLPC group placed a stake in the ground to build a $100 laptop—which in turn spurred the industry’s biggest players to create low-cost PCs. Mr Negroponte’s vision for a $100 laptop was not the right computer, only the right price. Like many pioneers, he laid a path for others to follow.

Intel Quits Effort to Get Computers to Children
SAN FRANCISCO — A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs.
In Peru, where One Laptop has begun shipping the first 40,000 PCs of a 270,000 system order, Isabelle Lama, an Intel saleswoman, tried to persuade Peru’s vice minister of education, Oscar Becerra Tresierra, that the Intel Classmate PC was a better choice for his primary school students.
Unfortunately for Intel, the vice minister is a longtime acquaintance of Mr. Negroponte and Seymour Papert, a member of the One Laptop team and an M.I.T. professor who developed the Logo computer programming language. The education minister took notes on his contacts with the Intel saleswoman and sent them to One Laptop officials. WOOPS!
Intel drops out of One Laptop Per Child program

Nigerian pupils work on computers at the LEA primary school in Abuja, in this May 30, 2007 picture. The school is a pilot site for the “One laptop per child” project, a non profit organization aimed at providing children in the world with a means to express their potential. Intel said on Thursday it will drop out of the One Laptop Per Child project and resign from the board after the project’s board demanded the chipmaker stop supporting other efforts in emerging markets. (Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde)