The Tragedy of One Laptop Per Child | Hacker News Reader

The Tragedy of One Laptop Per Child

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I think the biggest contribution of OLPC was to scare both hardware makers and Microsoft into creating netbooks. We wouldn't have netbooks today without OLPC. No one wanted to sell low end laptops because they wanted to maintain profit margins.

Perhaps OLPC will goad others into making great tablet PCs as well.

An interesting take. I do not remember it this way, however. Any links, papers, etc, with supporting evidence?

I remember it that way. When the OLPC was first announced in 2005, a "cheap" laptop was $799-999, and a decent one was about $1600. Now an average laptop (as long as it's not a Mac) is around $500, with cheap netbooks in the $300 range.

Citations:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/what_was_the_first_netbook

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

You're absolutely right, that's exactly how I remember it too.

People used to call me all the time, "I can't find a laptop under $1,000, help! What should I buy? Should I just get a desktop for $700? I can use the same monitor."

Now, my next portable is going to cost $100. It might be a tablet. Not too long from now, they're going to be in refrigerator magnets for $5.

If you are trying to say that the OLPC was what drove down laptop prices I would have to disagree. The OLPC was made possible by the same forces that drove down other laptop prices: cheaper electronics parts.

OLPC may have had a slight effect, but the larger cause was the natural development of computing technology. As electronics advance prices drop at a fairly predictable rate. What cost $100 this year is probably going to cost $50 next year, and $25 the year after that.

That is the real reason why laptops have gotten so cheap, not because of anything the OLPC foundation has done.

So, there's both a proximate and an ultimate cause. The ultimate cause of cheaper laptops is cheaper laptop parts. They wouldn't even be possible if the parts couldn't be had for less than the sale price.

But until somebody in the industry breaks from the pack and says "I'm going to offer this cheaply, damn the profits", all that cost savings accrues in profits to the OEMs. That maverick could be an upstart startup intent on market share with nothing to lose. Or it could be a nonprofit director on a mission to save the 3rd world.

In this case, the OLPC was the catalyst. The technology existed beforehand, and most people knew the technology existed. But Nicholas Negroponte was the first one to say "It can be done, therefore let's do it."

The same structure exists in lots of other industries. Why is broadband 10x faster in Japan than here (citation: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/bro...)? They have the same technology. But the telecom industry in the U.S. is a duopoly between Comcast and Verizon (with a few bit players), and they have an incentive to dribble out only enough in speed increases to stay ahead of their competitor.

Perfectly competitive markets exist only in an economics textbook. In the real world, things don't happen until somebody says "We're going to make it happen."

But until somebody in the industry breaks from the pack and says "I'm going to offer this cheaply, damn the profits", all that cost savings accrues in profits to the OEMs.

...or the manufacturers concentrate on bringing the features of $1500 laptops into the next generation of $1000 laptops, instead of bringing the features of $1000 laptops into a new generation of $750 laptops.

Cheaper electronics helped, but my rose colored memories are that...

* Manufacturers were using the lower cost electronics to add more features at the same price point rather than lowering their price point. The OLPC definitely shook that up.

* The OLPC led the way using linux for the underlying OS, which led to the first netbooks using linux. This really shook up Microsoft, resulting in them offering deeply discounted copies of WinXP to netbook manufacturers to recapture that market ($15? vs. $50++? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook#Windows, http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/19/ms.asks.15.for...).

With respect to the last bullet, the OLPC drove down software prices as much as Moore's Law drove down hardware prices.

The best link between OLPC and netbooks that I've found is Asus's CEO admitting that he was inspired by OLPC when they created the Eee PC:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=728044

Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for.

Inspiration counts for something.

Which may have been a significant factor in lowering overall price points. Generic laptops are now in the US$500 - 600 range (depending upon your definitions of "generic" and "laptop").

My (rather limited) understanding of the PC industry is that it does / did try to maintain certain price points in the face of ongoing technical improvements. For a while, the area around US$1000 was maintained for lower end systems. That has since gone by the wayside.

The primary impetus behind the EEE was massive overproduction of LCD screen assemblies for portable DVD players (7", 800x480) so the prices hit rock bottom, possibly below manufacturing cost. In addition there was a lot of dead stock of crap Celerons, along with Intel continuing to produce a really cheap several-generation-old power-hungry chipset as the bottom of their range.

Netbooks are a result of a boom/bust cycle in Taiwan and Shenzen.

I think it is a bit premature to call it a failure. I think there is far too much focus on the hardware going on. The fact is that OLPC is actually doing some pretty good work. Yes, the hardware is more expensive than they had hoped, but it is still really cheap, and the simplified UI does seem to work pretty well.

Their latest deployment is in Rwanda, and although I will fully admit that I was chagrined to see OLPC still selling, once I watched some of the videos and did some reading it was clear that they are actually doing some real good.

See: http://www.informationweek.com/video/infrastructure/36557810...

There is something to be said for having a bright green laptop that isn't terribly useful for adults and doesn't run a standard OS. It makes them less of a target for theft or resale in poorer countries and keeps them in the hands of the people that need them, the students.

I think a lot of good is yet to come from OLPC, it is just taking a lot longer than they expected. I do however fully agree that the touchscreen vision is a joke.

I really hate to see people bashing the OLPC for the wrong reasons. The project has a lot of flaws and a good couple lose ends, but, all in all, it is a great idea that has faced huge resistance from the very governments that should embrace it. I also suspect some governments active sabotage it because such a device allowing communication and free access to information would weaken their grip on local populations.

You really don't need the courseware, at least not at the start. All you really need to start is the regular textbooks transcribed as e-books. The kid can then carry and access all their books, current and future, in one compact volume, breaking any limitation on the kid's reading. Since OLPSs have network connections, governments (and educational associations) can also spend some money translating relevant topics from wikipedia, creating better localized versions. Classroom activities can also be developed on top of the localized software that already ships with them.

It's also lovely to suppose that local people cannot fix the machine because "this intended market is illiterate". Living in a third world country, I am deeply offended. This is, however, a failure of the OLPC plan. The OLPC should also have been directed towards US schools in order to gain momentum, perhaps even before attempting to go after the third world.

It's also foolish to overpromise impossible hardware. XO-2 and XO-3 are ludicrous. XO-1.75 is great, however. I love the idea of Windows-proofing it by running on ARM. I fail to see the educational value of running MS Ofice.

But it's absolutely unfair to expect the OLPC folks to develop courseware for the machine beyond the outstanding materials already there.

Huh? In what way is this a "tragedy"? Lack of clean water and mosquito nets is a tragedy. The 2004 tsunami was a tragedy. I don't know if the OLPC is a worthy goal or not but I'm quite sure it's not a tragedy that children don't have access to computers and it's not a tragedy that someone is trying to make them available.

In terms of mis-spent resources: i.e. opportunity costs. If the OLPC project is in fact a failure, consider how many mosquito nets could have been bought with the funds.*

* Yes, I know people / companies would not have donated the same amount of $ for a non-sexy cause.

It seems more efficient to try and raise economic activity to the point where foreign aid is no longer required; the OLPC was an attempt to do this through jump starting technology education.

The areas for which it was intended did not need mosquito nets - places such as rural Mexico. These places have power and running water.

While saving lives is a worthwhile goal, saving them just so they can carry on being perpetually dependent on foreign aid seems to be pretty unfair on both the nations giving aid and the nations receiving it.

A failure is hardly the same thing as a tragedy. The words are not interchangeable. People working toward the same end using different methods is not a tragedy even if one method is "better" than another.

Lack of knowledge and opportunity is certainly a tragedy. Buying all the mosquito nets to save lives is pretty useless if we don't help those same people grasp opportunity and become educated. The two causes are exclusive in terms of donation. Just because I donate to prevent Malaria does not mean I can't spend just as much or more to OLPC.

To illustrate the scale of the tragedy there are around 1.1bn people living in poverty.

If those people had been afforded opportunities similar to those available in the US their total salaries would be somewhere between $20 and $40 trillion.

That's a huge amount of wasted potential - all those resources could be working on making all of our lives better - advancing medicine, computer science, engineering and other things. Instead they are living miserable lives in atrocious slums.

If those people had been afforded opportunities similar to those available in the US their total salaries would be somewhere between $20 and $40 trillion.

Perhaps, but affording those people opportunities similar to those available in the United States might cost a great deal of money, and might also involve controversial steps such as overthrowing corrupt governments and promoting English rather than local languages as a language of school instruction. Poor countries (I have lived in them) are interacting systems of climate, natural resource base, cultural tradition, existing economic level, existing level of education, international trade patterns, political system, and other influences, and thus poor countries don't change overnight.

Indeed, which is why a small step (such as introducing a large number of cheap computers) is the only practical step.

You can't wait for perfection - you have to get started with what's practical now and iterate. Equal opportunity for all is the long term goal, not something you should expect tomorrow.

Fortunately whatever else the OLPC project did, it inspired the Eee and that inspired a whole generation of low power, cheap devices which are (more) affordable for everyone. That may not be the step they expected, but it's one in the right direction!

I'm quite sure it's not a tragedy that children don't have access to computers

This is an example of a radical opinion that one might expect to be downvoted for disagreement here on HN, but I see (from current net upvotes) that others agree, or at least think the comment contributes to the discussion here. I'll expand on this a bit, from my perspective as a parent of wealthy-country children who have long had access to computers. Of course I grew up without ready computer access. Children having personal computers with online access is, like most of human life, a TRADE-OFF. I think computers are wonderful tools and helpful for self-directed learning, but they are also enormous time sinks and distractions from books and many hands-on activities. Current research doesn't unambiguously show that computer use contrasted with nonuse is even an advantage for learning K-12 academic subjects. (Some studies appear to show academic achievement going down as computer use goes up in developed countries.) The role of easy telecommunications in fostering economic development seems beyond dispute, but voice telephony and an efficient postal system for adults may go most of the way to providing that benefit, without all children needing an Internet-connected laptop.

I have lived in poor countries, which is why I am conscious that where money is scarce, one must think about what way of spending money produces the best results. The OLPC project certainly had noble goals, and strove to be inexpensive, but perhaps the countries the project intended to serve need something else more urgently.

There is good that will come from OLPC even if OLPC as an organization were to vanish tomorrow.

PixelQi.com (spinoff from former CTO of OLPC) has developed a high-resolution LCD technology that will compete with e-Ink; since it uses mainstream LCD manufacturing the economies of scale will mean it will be much cheaper to produce an 11" e-reader.

Assuming PixelQI succeeds, this means even more e-readers for less money, and and an increase in whatever you perceive the benefits of e-readers to be (such as less paper waste, or better use of time).

The Sugar project http://www.sugarlabs.org/ is the software side of OLPC, able to be run from USB sticks on any old PC you have lying around; a P3-700 or higher is still pretty snappy. I know of several test implementations using it, for real, in schools (there are still bugs to work out until it can be deployed widely).

Neat hardware progress aside, has OLPC been a success in actually educating the target kids? Just putting laptops in hands doesn't automatically educate them. Here in the U.S., there are plenty of schools with computer labs, computers in classrooms, or even, yes, one laptop per child.

Based all my teacher and parent friends, all the increased access to computers here hasn't really improved education much. And we're buying expensive commercial educational software, not just Sugar or gCompris.

Maybe the time and money is better spent funding CC / public domain textbooks? That and Sugar are what I'm more interested in supporting.

To paraphrase you, just putting books in hands doesn't automatically educate them, either. There have been, and always will be, challenges in education. But for those who are willing and able to make good use of the resources available to them, computers and the Internet are two very powerful resources.

Funny how people with the biggest dreams end up taking the most flack.

OLPC was a big ambition and, like most new initiatives, was probably bound to fail initially. However, he had an idea and he did it! The great success is that future initiatives will have the opportunity to learn and improve upon it.

Are there other things that need fixing around the world? Yes, but the argument that we cannot do anything grand until every single primitive human need is solved is bunk. Innovation does not need to wait for a utopia.

"What’s the courseware and curriculum?"

And if you don't ask this question first, your well-intended project to 'gift the poor' becomes 'abetting the criminals'. Examples: FM. Television. Someone will fill the vacuum.

I maintain that there's a huge, untapped market for ed. software. Wikipedia is a powerful clue ... and, now, a free resource. But education's a lot more than shoveling data.

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