OLPC cuts 50% of staff
blog.laptop.org
blog.laptop.org
My generation grew up in an age where, for better and worse, the technology leaders also turned out to be pretty savvy businessmen (say what you will about Gates, Jobs, Ellison, et al they knew how to build an empire). But no one seems to realize how extraordinary that is or how important good business management can be.
These guys have failed to meet every deadline, gone over every budget and missed every price point they've ever tried to hit. It was going to catch up to them eventually.
That's because (a) all of the deadlines and price points were wildly optimistic from the beginning, and (b) all five of the countries who committed to buying a million laptops each in the first year backed out (in Thailand there was a coup, etc. etc.). But the achievements so far have been quite impressive.
You'd also have trouble meeting a price point estimated for a scale of tens or hundreds of millions of laptops when you were only shipping a few hundred thousand. There's a big bulk discount that comes with 2 extra orders of magnitude in purchasing.
Wild optimism goes some way to explaining it. But not to excusing it.
Does this point really need any more demonstration? You don't see Mister Rogers manning the gears of capitalism, do you?
However, don't be so cynical as to think this is a Law of the Universe. It is simply a fashion of our times, and might very well change.
You can't generalize about that many people - care to name who, exactly, you are talking about?
IMO, everyone has different motives, and those I know anything about were 100% care-driven. The people I know who worked on OLPC have no beef with MS whatsoever, use MS products every day, but believe strongly that proprietary software has a very different role to play in the long-run that it does now.
In countries that can pay it, software and marketing are a significant cost in producing computers, one that is passed on to the customer. Now, in an over-abundant economy like ours (USA), this is not morally questionable - without advertising budgets, my children would have nothing to eat. However, when you're talking about a country that will be increasing Microsoft's bottom line instead of investing in roads or basic education, that's plain wrong.
Now, far be it for me to pick at MS in exclusivity-- they were simply a convenient example. Rather, I only mean to illustrate that the moral questions of a monopoly in technology (be it hardware or software) are not completely dissolved in an affluent society, but only reduced.
I think your argument is sound, but I was thinking about a more intuitive form of morality.
When I have to pay an extra $x for Windows or OSX, that comes out of some books I'll buy, or some extra private saxophone/french lessons for my daughter, or maybe a new Wii. When a third-world country pays extra, that's money which could be spent on building infrastructure for millions of people who will die without it.
How did you decide the main point from the beginning was to stick it to Microsoft? You certainly wouldn't have heard it directly from anyone working there. Do you see inside their heads? (Note that all of these people worked at salaries dramatically lower than what they'd get in industry or even academia, for at least a couple of years of their lives. Would you do that just to "stick it to" some company you didn't like?)
Yes.
It might be better to phrase it like, "I'm changing the world", though.
Is technology really the issue here? Is the operating system or dust proof case really the bottleneck?
1. They are giving away machines at about ~100 dollars less than a basic Dell machine (and Dell can probably go even lower when dealing with governments). These machines are vastly inferior to a Dell machine, and Windows, like it or not, is a more suitable OS for business and educational purposes.
2. They are missing out on a key fact: Computers are just not that useful for education. Yes, you can get a world of information from them, but if you actually see young people interact with them, it's mostly games and social sites and porno. This was true when I was a kid (except for the porno), and still is from my observations. A small number of students will actually use the computers to real effect.
3. AND that small number of kids can be serviced by a few computers per school. Think Gates and Allen at their school's single mainframe hookup.
2 & 3 I think they were trying to address these with the software & the personal laptop issue. Sticking a few machines in a school means they support whatever the school was doing before, innovation will probably not happen this way. They probably don't have that much of an advantage there.
The way I see it, they're not that far off base but they still may be completely irrelevant. Computer literacy is important in that later on, at 15 or 18 or 25 those kids will be able to decide "I want to learn to program" or "I need to know accounting" or "I want to know if what this politician is saying is BS" or "I want to start an internet business" & go do it. You need to be comfortable enough with the machine to know where to start.
I know that if I want to know about bookkeeping or the French Revolution or growing sweet potatoes in slightly acidic sandy soil, I can do it online. It's about making it cheaper & easier for people everyone to know this too.
Bullshit. Most people there want Windows as much as I want to use the IDE my boss's boss's boss decides to buy for all developers.
It's all about sales: steak and strippers, baby!
They see people pushing alternatives at them as paternalistic shits at best.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071031-classmate-pc-o...
P.S. Thanks for making a reasonable request for information rather than cursing!
BTW, it's not just about MS vs OS. It's about Sugar. The OS is (I hear) very different from other mainstream OSs. Education ministers in countries where computer literacy is low here "Use a computer that is so different from every other computer that students will not be able to use any other computer."
Sucks for them. Selling to large organizations is an art people perfect for decades.
BTW, it's not just about MS vs OS. It's about Sugar.
Sorry, I was generalizing, I stand corrected. Bah, if what the education ministers want is "computer literacy" in the sense of "how to use Windows, Word, and Excel", that's their mistake to make. What sucks most is that they sure as hell won't be affected by it.
Maybe if government were run more like a company... where salaries were dependent on change-in-per-capita-GDP under one's tenure (plus a smaller piece of long-term deltas).
On a tangent point- I am less & less confident in this sort of pay-by-incentive executive engineering.
On the first point. I don't think you can blame them really. There is no push to get these machines into kids' hands in the US or Switzerland where all the kids have Windows. Why should they do it. It's not like there is a huge chunk of evidence that XOs are a better educational tool.
I think it's worrying that every review you here that someone got their hands on one, thought it was neat, couldn't figure out what to do with it & gave it to a school.
Can you explain who exactly is supposed to be employing the steak and strippers upon whom?
Actually, if you go listen to Negroponte's first few speeches floating the idea publicly, encouraging other companies to build el-cheapo laptops and ultimately getting them into children's hands was explicitly mentioned as a way for the project to succeed even if no one bought laptops from OLPC itself.
Dirt poor kids don't need laptops - they need clean water, vitamins, and malaria vaccines.
The project was a scam by ivory tower intellectuals deeply out of touch with the real world, and more interested in reinventing the wheel than in accomplishing good.
The sooner this project entirely dies, the better.
You can deliver both the vitamins and the laptops too. It isn't a binary choice.
By putting a computer in the hands of a child, it could give him a future he might not have otherwise. At which point, he might return to his village and ensure future generations have those things.
I don't know if OLPC has played the game correctly, but in general, I feel excited when I hear computers reaching the hands of kids who would never otherwise see them in their lifetimes.
Don't forget the opportunities you've been given living simply by being born in a first-world country.
Frankly, I would encourage you to not be so flip about calling such a well-intentioned and, dare I say successful program a scam. If you really think that it is, then fine. That's a tall order, though, and you'll have to do more than invoke some hackneyed stereotypes to convince others.