India Latest To Try And Fail Where The Market Has Succeeded

from the one-more-time dept

One of the most puzzling aspects of the One Laptop Per Child project has been the apparent belief of its leadership that it and it alone had the right to try and deliver low-cost netbooks for the young and poor of the world. While netbook sales are booming, the OLPC project looks to be struggling. This once again has us scratching our heads at why the OLPC folks felt the need to go things alone, rather than working more closely with industry to deliver low-cost laptops with high functionality that combined the ability of a competitive market to drive down prices with OLPC's philanthropic goals and the innovations of its device aimed at its target market. But OLPC's struggles haven't deterred other groups from pursuing a similar path, including the Indian government. Following failed negotiations with OLPC, it said it would create its own $100 laptop, and that laptop is set to debut on Tuesday.

Initially, reports put the device's cost at $10, an error blamed on a mistranslation, leading to a lot of wonder about just how the Indian government could drive the price so low. But even if you accept the correct figure of $100, some of the questions are still valid: if cost is the metric deemed most important by the device's builders, does it put a limitation on the devices' utility? Put another way, is functionality sacrificed in the name of low cost to such a point that the devices become largely useless? Either way, it still seems hard to believe that small, individual efforts can deliver better devices at a lower cost than efforts that piggyback on netbooks' success in the market. This isn't to say that governmental and non-profit efforts can't deliver good innovations, but it seems slightly beyond belief that they will be better able to drive down manufacturing costs better than the competitive market. Wouldn't their resources be better focused on delivering specific innovations, particularly in software and systems, that could be paired with market-based cheap netbooks of any kind, rather than developing their own proprietary, expensive and underpowered devices? This is a lesson that the OLPC crew seems to finally be learning, given the recent news that they're open-sourcing their hardware. Hopefully other groups will pick up on it, too.

Filed Under: india, olpc
Companies: olpc

OLPC Finally Decides to Open Source Its Hardware

from the it's-about-time dept

The many travails of the One Laptop Per Child program have been widely chronicled - after developing a robust, innovative laptop for the developing world, Nicholas Negroponte's educational project failed to garner the reception he expected. One of the main reasons for this was OLPC's belief that the market could not do better than their small project: instead of seeking the best products for the children of the developing world, competition was anathema to the OLPC group.

But news that the hardware from OLPC's second version, XO-2, will be open sourced, gives hope that things are starting to change. Speaking to the Guardian, Negroponte says, "The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google - we'll want people to copy it. We'll make the constituent parts available. We'll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1." Open hardware is an exciting new arena for innovative designs and, by embracing it, OLPC will create a new opportunity for entrepreneurs to create the best laptop for the developing world (or even the developed world). Also, instead of picking an established manufacturer from East Asia, open sourced hardware specifications will allow the developing world's emergent technology industries to compete, strengthening the communities OLPC seeks to assist.

Filed Under: bazaar, bottom up, cathedral, comeptition, nicholas negroponte, olpc, open source, top down
Companies: olpc

OLPC Discovers Economic Reality; Cuts Staff

from the but-the-dream-is-closer... dept

We've certainly been somewhat harsh on Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC program in the past -- not because we don't like the idea of helping underprivileged kids building technology skills, but because of the way Negroponte has run the project from the beginning. He's acted as if he were the only one who should be working towards that goal and any competition was seen as a betrayal. Also, he took a very top down Negroponte-knows-best approach to building the laptop, which has led to significant problems within the team and with the product not living up to expectations -- showing once again that ideas are easy, it's the execution that's difficult, and if you limit the execution to just one company, you're cutting off a lot of the opportunity.

So, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that OLPC is now cutting its workforce in half, and slashing salaries for remaining employees. Negroponte blames the economy, but that seems like an especially weak excuse, given just how strongly small, inexpensive mini-laptops (netbooks) are selling these days. Clearly, there's tremendous demand out there for super cheap, small laptops. The problem is that Negroponte decided from the beginning that his product was only for kids in developing countries, and left a massive market underserved (the rather weak give one, get one program was hardly serving the market).

But, again, the point is clear: the overall market is doing a rather amazing job serving the market. They're providing all sorts of very cheap mini laptops at price points even below what the OLPC is going for. No, most netbooks don't have some of the bells and whistles of the OLPC that help it survive a rough environment, but it seems rather likely that used netbooks and newer cheaper netbooks will find their way into developing countries soon enough as well -- just as second hand mobile phones have made it. So, in the end, Negroponte's original vision may get served, but it will get served by the market and competition, rather than his own grand master plan.

Filed Under: competition, execution, ideas, nicholas negroponte, olpc
Companies: olpc

$100 Laptop Still $400, But Now With More Advertising

from the market?-bah dept

Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative has received plenty of press over the years, though we've never quite fully understood it. While the idea of making cheap, durable laptops available to people worldwide has some value, the benefits haven't been fully explained and Negroponte's thoughts on how best to deliver them have been a bit perplexing. In particular, his apparent belief that competition in the space is a bad -- when competition might actually help realize the goal of a $100 machine more quickly than if OLPC goes it alone. In an attempt to boost volume, OLPC is getting a bunch of media companies to donate airtime and and ad space for a marketing campaign for the machine, trying to drive donations or sales under its "Give One, Get One" program, where people can spend $400 for an XO of their own, while another one gets donated to the cause. The head of the agency which created the ads for the campaign says they'll help build the economies of scale necessary to get the XO laptops down to the magical $100 price point.

Meanwhile, the prices of other netbooks, as these things do, continue to fall. While none are yet down to $100, it's hard to imagine that it will be too much longer before somebody breaks the barrier. And it probably won't be the OLPC group. With that in mind, Negroponte's anti-competitive, go-it-alone stance continues to confuse. If the market and competition can drive prices down, that's great for the OLPC mission, right? So why not abandon the single-product model (especially since hardware is basically a commodity, even with the XO's features), and focus on getting as many devices as possible -- even if they're another brand -- into schools worldwide? If the real OLPC innovation is the software, install it on the machines. It would certainly seem that the best course of action is to do whatever will drive the cost down the most quickly, and somehow using the growing consumer netbook market, rather than OLPC standing alone with its own machine, would do that. Negroponte seems hesitant to acknowledge that the bigger market can actually help OLPC's mission, even when ignoring that fact hampers that mission.

Filed Under: $100, advertising, olpc

Will Nicholas Negroponte Ever Understand That Competition Isn't About Killing OLPC?

from the get-over-it dept

We've never quite understood Nicholas Negroponte's position when it comes to the $100 Laptop/OLPC/XO (whatever it's called these days). While the idea behind creating a super cheap, super durable useful computer for children in developing nations is good, Negroponte has always approached the idea as one where only he should be allowed to see that vision through. When other companies decided it might be a good idea and wanted to target that market themselves, Negroponte flipped out and started attacking them for trying to undermine his project.

Sorry, Nicholas, but competition isn't undermining.

In fact, competition is generally what drives all parties to be better at what they do, in order to fend off the competition. Yet, somehow, the UK's Times Online has bought into Negroponte's side of the story and written up an article bashing Microsoft and Intel for trying to "kill" the OLPC. The article is riddled with factual errors and opinion substituting as fact, but the worst is in the central point of the article. The author mistakes companies all aiming for the same market as a nefarious attempt to "kill off" Negroponte's pet project -- as if he has some universal right to the market that no one else can attempt to enter. It also brushes over some simple facts, like the one where many countries have looked at the OLPC and realized it doesn't really serve their needs just yet. That, if anything, should be even more reason why competition is necessary. It helps create better products that actually serve the needs of people in those markets, rather than just what Negroponte decides they must want in his top-down manner.

Filed Under: competition, execution, ideas, nicholas negroponte, olpc
Companies: amd, intel, microsoft, olpc

OLPC Learning That Ideas Are Easy, Execution Is Hard

from the competition dept

Business Week has an in-depth write-up about the One Laptop Per Child project's first deployments in developing countries. The original plan called for building 150 million laptops by the end of 2008; it now looks like they'll be lucky to ship a million before the end of the year. It appears that a big part of the problem is that Nicholas Negroponte and his team underestimated the support requirements for the laptops. Getting laptops into the hands of poor children is good, but it's a lot better if the laptops come with training for teachers and support personnel on how to use them effectively. OLPC may have hoped to build a laptop that was so easy to use that little support was required, but the countries writing the checks don't appear to have bought the argument. Nigeria, for example, backed out of a previous commitment to buy a million laptops from OLPC, opting for Intel's Classmate PC instead. Intel's superior support was cited as the major reason for the decision.

This highlights what was so ridiculous about Negroponte's demand that other companies stop offering competing low-cost laptops. Negroponte deserves credit for pioneering the concept of producing cheap laptops for poor children, but coming up with the idea is, relatively speaking, the easy part. What's far more difficult is the execution. Technical wizardry is an important part of that, to be sure, but probably even more important are the logistical details: keeping the project on time and under budget and ensuring that the shipping project has adequate support. There are a million ways for things to go wrong, which is why it's a good to have a bunch of different organizations working on the problem in parallel. By his own admission, Negroponte is more a visionary than a strong manager, which is precisely why he should have welcomed the entry of a company with Intel's logistical prowess into the market. It may not be as personally satisfying for him to have a for-profit company finish the job he started, but if the goal is to help poor children, then he should be happy to see them being offered more options.

Filed Under: competition, execution, ideas, nicholas negroponte, olpc

OLPC Is A Cathedral But OLPC Tech Is Fleeing Into The Bazaar

from the top-down-or-bottom-up dept

From the outset, one of the oddities of the One Laptop Per Child project has been the tension between its organizational philosophy and its software platform. In his famous essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Eric Raymond contrasted two organizational philosophies for developing software. In the Cathedral, software projects are organized in a top-down fashion, with the development process following a plan carefully developed by the project's leaders. In contrast, the philosophy of the Bazaar is to "release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity." The OLPC project was a strange beast because it was clearly organized on the "Cathedral" model, yet it was developed around Linux, the open source project that Raymond used as the poster child for the "Bazaar" style of development. And its broader vision of empowering third-world kids to use the laptops without a lot of central support, is clearly more Bazaar than Cathedral.

I think many of the problems we've noted with the project stemmed from this fundamental conflict of visions. Nicholas Negroponte's vision for the OLPC organization has always been the model of the Cathedral: produce a perfect laptop on the first try and sell it in batches of a hundred thousand to the world's governments. Negroponte's plan left little room for the kind of development growth, bottom-up participation, and trial-and error that characterizes the Bazaar. Indeed, even when customers were beating down the door to try out Negroponte's product, he resisted selling it to them because it conflicted with his vision. And of course, he absolutely hated the idea of his customers having other options to choose from.

This tension was never sustainable, and indeed there are increasing signs that OLPC's innovative technologies are being steadily liberated from the Cathedral. In January, we noted that one OLPC alum was starting a new firm to commercialize the OLPC's display technology. Now CNet notes that another OLPC alum, Walter Bender, is starting a new software spinoff to license OLPC technology to a variety of laptop manufacturers. Bender's decision to start a new company was presumably sparked by Negroponte's decision to run OLPC more like Microsoft, which one engineer claims involved demoting Bender in favor of someone with less technical expertise.

It seems that the folks who have left OLPC have a more Bazaar-like vision for their companies, licensing their technologies to a variety of companies. In contrast, Negroponte seems to be doubling down on the "Cathedral" model. He's reportedly considering a switch from Linux to Windows. That would be oddly appropriate given the apparent similarities between Negroponte's management philosophy and Steve Ballmer's.

Filed Under: bazaar, bottom up, cathedral, comeptition, olpc, top down

OLPC Faces Growing Competition, And That's A Good Thing

from the like-it-or-not dept

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting story looking at the rise of dirt-cheap laptops and the potential impact these laptops will have in developing countries. It gives a fair amount of attention to the One Laptop Per Child project, which was obviously one of the early players in this space. I've had my share of criticisms of the OLPC project, but one thing I do have to give them credit for is that their XO laptop seems to be very competitive with the laptops being offered by commercial companies. Most of them, such as the Asus Eee PC, are priced in the $299 to $399 range; it appears that no one has yet figured out how to produce a full-featured laptop at that magic $100 price point. The thing this article does highlight, though, is that OLPC is operating in an increasingly competitive market. OLPC head Nicholas Negroponte says "I don't want to compete with anyone," but he's going to have to compete whether he likes it or not.

One of the most intriguing competitors is Ncomputing, which is trying to resurrect the dumb terminal model for people on a shoestring budget. Ncomputing uses a cheap ($350) PC as a server to drive a bunch of ridiculously cheap ($70) terminals. Dumb terminals are almost as old as the computing industry itself, but getting the terminals to be this cheap certainly opens things up to new markets by bringing hardware costs within reach of that magic $100 price point. Of course, these dumb terminals won't be as portable as an XO laptop, and they likely require more tech support. Schools in developing countries will have to weigh those disadvantages against the XO's higher price and decide what will serve their students best. And that's the way it should be: more competition means that end users will be able to choose the computing solution that best fits their unique circumstances and budget.

Filed Under: $100 computer, competition, olpc
Companies: asus, ncomputing, olpc

When We Said OLPC Should Act Like A Tech Company, We Didn't Mean Microsoft

from the bureaucracy dept

In the latest blow to the OLPC project, the organization's security chief, Ivan Krstić, has resigned over philosophical disagreements with the organization's direction. The nub of the dispute seems to be chairman Nicholas Negroponte's belief that now that it's out of its startup phase, the project needs to be run "more like Microsoft." Krstić complains that the organization's previous president, Walter Bender, was demoted, and Krstić was asked to report to "a manager with no technical or engineering background who was put in charge of all OLPC technology." Now as we've said before, it's healthy that the OLPC organization is beginning to realize that they face many of the same challenges as for-profit technology companies, and might be more successful if it adopted some of their methods. But bringing in non-technologists for senior leadership positions and adopting a rigidly hierarchical org chart might be taking things a little too far. Culture matters in technology companies, and it probably matters even more in an organization like OLPC that depends on having employees willing to go above and beyond the call of duty for relatively modest pay. More orderly management is a good thing, but not if you cause your best people to jump ship in the process.

Filed Under: non-profit, olpc, startups
Companies: olpc

OLPC And Intel Split Over Friction From Competing Laptop

from the sore-losers dept

Last year, after a very public spat with Intel over its competing Classmate PC, the One Laptop Per Child project appeared to patch up its differences with Intel and welcome them as a supporter. Now, they've had a nasty breakup, with each blaming the other for the separation. Intel said OLPC had demanded it stop selling the Classmate PC as a condition of continuing as a supporter of the OLPC project. OLPC head Nicolas Negroponte countered that Intel had "contributed nothing of value" to the OLPC project in the last six months. Negroponte's claims don't make a lot of sense. If Intel had merely failed to contribute resources to the project, that would hardly justify such a public and acrimonious split. The only other complaint, that Intel "continued to disparage" OLPC's product after joining the project, suggests that Negroponte is tacitly conceding that Intel's Classmate PC was the real sore point. As we said last year, this seems like a case of sour grapes on Negroponte's case. It's ridiculous to think that in a world with hundreds of millions of poor children there should only be one low-cost laptop design. Giving governments in developing countries more options can only be a good thing for poor kids. Negroponte sniffs that "we view the children as a mission; Intel views them as a market." But if Intel is able to provide developing countries with a better laptop at a lower price—and turn a profit in the process—what's wrong with that? Losing those sales might bruise Negroponte's ego, but it's hard to see how it's bad for the kids whose interests Negroponte claims to champion.

Filed Under: $100 laptop, nicholas negroponte, olpc
Companies: intel, olpc