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One Laptop Per Child: What Went Wrong
One Laptop Per Child: What Went Wrong
January 19th, 2009
by Jon Evans
<http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2009/01/19/one-laptop-per-child-what-went-wrong/ >
In January 2005, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,  
Nicholas Negroponte announced the One Laptop Per Child project, with  
the stated goal of giving every poor child in the world a “rugged, low- cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed  
for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.”

Last week OLPC laid off half of its staff. Sales of its XO Laptop to  
developing nations are far, far below initial projections in the  
millions; in the third quarter of 2008 it shipped a mere 130,000  
units, a trivial 2.3% of the world’s low-cost, small-screen “netbook”  
laptops. Meanwhile, the income from their 2008 “Give One Get One Free”  
drive dropped 93% from 2007. What went wrong? Any number of things,  
including bad timing, production delays, poor management, and superior  
competition. But if you ask me ­ and I feel bad writing this, given  
all the hard work and good intentions that went into One Laptop Per  
Child ­ its fundamental problems are twofold:

    • It was a bad idea to begin with.
    • The XO laptop is a piece of crap.
The best thing about the XO is its case: the pebbled exterior, built- in handle, and dust/water resistance (which I didn’t test) are stylish  
and useful. The problems begin when you open it up. It’s slow. On  
occasion the cursor freezes or submarines. The screen and keyboard are  
tiny even for a netbook. Even its vaunted connectivity is badly  
flawed: my XO completely failed to connect to encrypted Wi-Fi networks  
that worked with both my other laptops. When you do connect, its Web  
browser fails to show paragraph breaks on Wikipedia pages, making the  
world’s greatest collection of free information hard to read ­ on a  
laptop allegedly designed for education!

--


Another thing that went wrong was that Nicholas Negropante completely 
ignored the rise of the mobile phone in the Third World. In the West 
the primary communications device is the computer.  In polyglot 
countries with low literacy the primary communications device is a 
phone.  In Africa trading is done by voice pencil and paper or chalk 
and tablet. As a consequence so is learning. Culturally it will be 
easier to augment low cost telephones to meet their needs rather than 
invent new paradigms, as such devices will have high economies of scale.

The downside of this approach is that it does not allow for 
showboating.  Nobody got on the cover of Wired for making something 
"slightly cheaper", as Douglas Adams once put it.

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