$100 PC Pledges Fail To Meet Minimum

bobthemuse writes, "Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop PC was demonstrated back in May, and a PledgeBank was set up: the goal was to get 100,000 people to purchase an OLPC for $300, allowing the project to send two of the devices to the proposed users. Today the pledge ended and only 3,678 people had signed up." It looks like a mention in Slashback a few weeks ago gave a boost to the effort, but not a big enough one.

Comments

Only if 99,999 other will too

[biocute]

I wonder if there is a special reason that requires 100,000 participants (that is, 200,000 OLPC, 300,000 altogether).

Does that mean they can't produce and sell these laptop if there were only 5,000 orders?

Slashdot effect?!

[SpaghettiPattern]

You'd say PledgeBank would run into a problem in handling all the applications by all them righteous slashdotters. You know, the geeks that get bullied, kicked and bashed because they read books, are proficient with computers, value educated discussion and surely would want to give poorer people a shot at being educated.

... But they didn't ...

There must a whole bunch of cheapskates here on slashdot.

FYI, I pledged for three. Then, for a short time, I contemplated to let them keep the third PC as well. But that is betrayal because you shouldn't dump second grade stuff onto the 3rd world. I decided to actually use the third one seriously and to contribute at least with bug reports.

Hell, I even convinced my not-so-techie brother to pledge and he did. And also consider that we're not from the USA. We're from a part of the world where USD 300 is a higher percentage of our nett income.

Not a lack of interest

[Zouden]

Rather, an unrealistic expectation. It's difficult to sell 100,000 of anything, let alone through a grassroots campaign like this.

$120

[rlp]

Sell it to slashdot users for $120 (mfg makes a small profit). That way some of the buyers will end up using it to develop OSS educational SW for it. They should also color code the units; say green for students, blue for teachers, and red for developers (the $120 units). That way if you see a green unit for sale on E-bay - you (and E-bay) knows it's stolen property.

Not inferior, just slower!

[Half-pint HAL]

Nor do I believe that dumping things that we wouldn't use on the 3rd world is going to make the [technology] gap disappear -- au contraire. I'd rather see them receive one $1000 laptop than ten $100 ones that aren't similar to what the rest of the world use. "Better than what they have" isn't a valid argument, as it serves to keep the gap.

Developing countries cannot maintain a "fleet" of up-to-date computers, as every PC is rendered obsolete by "progress" within 3 years. "what the rest of the world uses" is a con -- p*ss-poor programming and planned obsolescence mean we spend ridiculous amounts of money to continue to be able to do the same thing year-on-year.

I work in an IT support department -- my PC is used for email, word-processing and browsing, and as a Citrix client for connecting to our SMS servers. All this could be done adequately on a Win95-era Pentium. However, my current 2.8 GHz, 248MB WinXP PC continues to grind along far too slowly.

One of the key benefits of the OLPC project is that unlike the schemes that redeploy old corporate kit, it defines a closed platform. It can run word processors; it can do email; it can run a Xterm/Citrix/TS/etc client, and it will never become obsolete as it has an established user base. It would become a reference minimum-spec platform for a great deal of Linux development.

Knock-on effects? Maybe the developed world would break out of the continual upgrade cycle. With a fixed minimum-spec machine for office tasks, maybe network computing would finally take off, with every office deploying application servers for the (rare) processor intensive apps. Perhaps we'd see more efficient, non-bloat software. Perhaps the developed countries would say "That's neat -- I bet I could fit that in a palmtop" and finally bridge the gap between desktop and handheld computing.

HAL

Re:New and experimental Pledge

[TomSteinberg]

Hmm, a few people including Kevin Maney at USA Today seem to have got confused about who made the original Pledge. It was created by a user of PledgeBank, not the team that runs PledgeBank. PledgeBank hosts any pledges which are not themselves illegal, or which incite illegal behaviour. The little experimental cascading pledge we made yesterday was just that - it was mainly about testing a new feature which we're not quite sure how to present to our users yet. I know OLPCs aren't on general sale, and may well never be, but I'm sure nobody would object to the formation of some hacking clubs if they ever were to be made available for purchase.