The embattled OLPC program, already reeling from job cuts and salary decreases, is making one final attempt to stay afloat: Open source everything and hope enough companies copy the design to make it profitable.
Today, Ars Technica picked up a blip from Nicholas Negroponte, who informed readers of his intention to cut half the staff and reduce pay of the rest, and emphasising the shift to hardware.
When I met with Nicholas Negroponte not long ago, he laughed at the coverage he’d received through the past few years, including our own portrayal of Intel chairman Craig Barrett and him as Beavis and Butthead. Far more hurtful have been the admonitions of his own former staffers who feel he has mismanaged the OLPC project. Nearly every one of the original staff had abandoned the project by 2008, often in disgust. But Negroponte remains stalwart: “My elephant skin is the thickness of steel,” he told me. Perhaps his resistance to criticism has been one of the project’s fatal flaws.
In November of 2005, Nicholas Negroponte and his OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen travelled to Tunisia for the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society, where they were able to present a “working” US$100 laptop concept to Kofi Annan, UN secretary general. No longer did the machine rely on that pop-up rear-projection display; it was smaller, made of green plastic, and had a crank for the kids to work—for 10 straight minutes per hour of use—when they had no other access to electricity. It was a vast improvement over that January’s pup-tent rear-projection laptop, hampered only by the fact that it was an absolute fake.
From the moment Nicholas Negroponte showed off his US$100 laptop concept at the Davos world economic summit in January 2005, it was as if the tech world’s supermoguls were glowering down on him in judgment. Over the course of the year, Craig Barrett, Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs weighed in, privately declining support and in some cases publicly disparaging the idea.
The naysayers had a point. The mockup Negroponte was toting around that winter was one ugly baby. It aimed to reach the US$100 price tag by having a slower processor, a skinnier internal drive, a smaller body and let’s not forget that tent-like rear-projection screen that made it look like the conceptual heir to the pop-top VW Vanagon camper. But after three and a half years, Negroponte’s crazy idea hasn’t only produced the XO, a real laptop co-developed and manufactured by the world’s largest notebook maker, it’s also become a product most of Negroponte’s opponents are now copying.
After interviewing Negroponte himself, along with his original CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, designer Yves Behar, advanced technologies VP Michail Bletsas and others, we can explain how this proposed global humanitarian effort may in fact be more successful as a revolution in hardware design, and how OLPC will continue to influence the hardware you buy, even if you never score an actual XO.
In a chat with Laptop Mag about the booming ultra-cheap, ultra-portable laptop market, blustery and beleaguered OLPC founder Nick Negroponte actually manages to keep his cool while dissing his rivals—a laudable feat—and drops a couple of interesting bits: OLPC is still on a trajectory toward a US$50 laptop, and they’re planning on launching dual-boot Windows XP machines worldwide. Thems some lofty goals—aside from their epic fail to hit just US$100, XO’s crafty designer is only trying to clear $75. Good luck, Nick. [Laptop Mag]
Reports of OLPC’s Negroponte looking for a replacement to fill his CEO role were a bit unfounded, as the man himself just claimed that the organisation HAS no CEO, and that whatever the replacement does, it won’t be what Negroponte is doing. Negroponte says:
The One Laptop Per Child project, initially famed for its lofty goals, became known for becoming one of the more impressive shitshows in tech, in part thanks to founder Nick Negroponte’s own foibles. So it’s probably not a bad thing for the org—as much credit as he deserves for starting it—that he’s stepping off to let someone else take over. “I am not a CEO. Management, administration, and details are my weaknesses.” Probably shouldn’t be at the top then, bub. [BusinessWeek via FSJ]
The WSJ basically pulverises the OLPC project in an exquisitely detailed piece laying out its trials and tribulations. Its thesis is that the idea—cheap laptops for everyone—is so damn good that everyone else built their own uber-cheap laptops, thrusting OLPC into cutthroat competition. Result? Countries and school systems are buying cheap computers, just not the XO laptop. That’s not so bad. It’s the details that are fucking brutal.
To date, only 2,000 students have gotten their XO Laptop, and Uruguay’s the only solid national deal with 100,000 ordered. Nicholas Negroponte says Peru’s on the hook for 250,000, but we know how that’s gone. And less than 300,000 will be pumped out of Taiwan by the end of this year. At most, 1 million a month will roll off of conveyor belts next year. The WSJ’s penchant for understatement is comically beautiful here: “Mr. Negroponte’s goal of 150 million users by the end of 2008 looks unattainable.” More »
The two biggest rivals aiming to distribute laptops to the third-world shorties—Intel, develper of the Classmate PC, and One Laptop Per Child led by Nick Negroponte—have shaken hands and buried the hatchet, says the AP. Here’s the skinny: More »
