Comment by jcl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcl | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

She's talking not of the OLPC's success but that of netbooks as a whole (which is her current bread-and-butter). 50 million sold in 2009 is conceivable, 25 million is more realistic, given that about five million sold in the first quarter of the year.

She is right that without Negroponte there would be no OLPC, and she is also probably correct that without the OLPC's tremendous "$100 laptop" buzz in 2006, there would be no Asus Eee in 2007, which really kicked off the netbook craze.

Regarding the discussion of whether computers belong in children's hands, I had the opposite reaction: The idea that each child should have their own laptop computer that they carry with them is still a fairly controversial one, IMHO. Negroponte hardly ended the discussion, but he did serve to legitimize/popularize Seymour Papert's earlier Dynabook proposal.

I'm sorry but this is just BS. Other than "they're both small" name me all the similarities between the Eee PC and the OLPC. How did a computer sold to kids in third world countries inspire a bunch of middle class Americans to buy netbooks. More over for your theory to be true you have to ignore the constant attempts companies have been making at what is now the netbook market. Everything from the Newton to Microsoft's Handheld PC.

Netbooks are flourshing now because technology has gotten to the point where you can fit a full OS on them. It has nothing to do with the OLPC

From a Forbes article on Jonney Shih, CEO of Asus:

But around that time, two low-cost notebook models were making waves. Last November tech guru Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC, program released its first batch of prototype laptops designed for children in the developing world. And Intel was getting ready to launch a competing laptop, the Classmate PC, for a similar market. So, Shih thought, why not make a small, inexpensive laptop for grown-ups?

http://members.forbes.com/global/2007/1112/024a.html

For years prior to the OLPC, we had been able to make a small laptop with a full OS... The OLPC's AMD Geode CPU was seven years old at the time they chose to use it. What none of the manufacturers realized was that there was any sort of market for a vastly underpowered, almost unusably cramped, extremely cheap laptop that attempts to run a full OS. The media buzz created by the OLPC revealed this market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com