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OLPC Downsizes Half of Its Staff, Cuts Sugar
One Laptop Per Chewbacca writes "Nicholas Negroponte, the leader of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that the organization will be laying off half of its staff, cutting salaries of the remaining employees, and ending its involvement in Sugar development. The organization has had serious problems with production and deployment and has been fragmented by ideological debates as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows. Ars Technica concludes: 'The OLPC project's extreme dependence on economy of scale has proven to be a fatal error. The organization was not able to secure the large bulk orders that it had originally anticipated and fell short of meeting its target $100 per unit price. The worldwide economic slowdown has made it even more difficult for OLPC to find developing countries that have cash to spare on education technology.'"
If you're changing your original goals (I'm thinking particularly about Sugar here) mid-way through, you'll crash faster.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Congratulations, you crushed a competitor and, at the same time, destroyed hope for millions of needy people.
Even if you disagree that third world governments buying these laptops would have done anything, at least it might have gotten them interested in greater investment in education.. it might have gotten them thinking that more of the first world actually gives a shit.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Even though I thought it was a stupid idea, it did have one redeeming point. It would have turned a small segment of the population in those countries into producers instead of keeping them as consumers.
When they decided to support Windows, that killed the only positive point I could see in it. They would be kept as consumers.
They can save money by switching from Windows to Linux!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
schools. Particularly grade schools and middle schools. A laptop that doesn't need maintenance. They launched that initiative 1 year back, but it was too little too late. They were actually quite hostile toward selling it in America or developed world.
Now, I don't believe computers are all that great in the classroom, but if they wanted economies of scale, it would make more sense to sell to the rich, gadget-happy country first to build up production and also legitimacy in the eyes of 3rd worlders. I imagine if MIT pushed it, some Massachusetts area schools might have adopted. Then the OLPC project could have put that on their resume as well.
No one got fired for buying Microsoft/IBM is true, and if the competitor is a relatively unknown, untested entity, doubly so. I think the move to Windows just killed it though, since it didn't differentiate OLPC laptop from any other to the casual observer.
I'm certain that the submitter is correct: Allowing windos in killed the project.
Why? Because projects like this rely on the goodwill of volunteers. That comes from ideology, in a neutral sense, i.e. from people believing in something. Very few people believe in windos. It has millions of users, but few "believers". On the other hand, Linux has a very high percentage of believers among its users, it's easy to find volunteers who will contribute for free, or support the distribution channels, convince their local leaders, and so on.
There are things that money can not buy. You can build a religion on money (see Scientology), but not a crusade.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Its just a bad time overall.
I think their business plan was fundamentally flawed, and deciding to go with Windows (meaning extra cost) when they were having trouble getting down to the price point they wanted even without it was just the final nail in the coffin.
They, like many other companies these days, are using the poor economy as a convenient excuse for dumping salary, but they were likely doomed anyway.
The OLPC is a noble idea, but I think Negroponte has underestimed the the will of its competitors to ensure OLPC doesn't take hold to give them a clear advantage.
When Intel "stole" the contract for the government of Venezuela, Negroponte was outraged, but what his missing is, its just business.
I congratulate Negroponte for his incredible effort to have a vision to give the poor the tools needed to escape dispair and to build a device, but in the end, if Intel can do it, and do it better - than it really doesn't matter.
I'd like to see the poor using free software, but in the end i'd prefer them to have food in their bellies and using commercial software than having free software and going hungry with a bankrupt OLPC.
Its a shame, because I personally love the look of the OLPC, the Classmate looks terrible purely from an aesthetic perspective.
They only wanted to sell the fine things to people who couldn't afford them. The people who could? They could buy one, if they paid for two...
The correct way to handle it would be to charge $250 domestically and put them next to the game consoles in Wal*Mart, so lower middle-class parents can buy them for their kids. 1/5 of 10 million sales would pay for a hell of a lot more "donated" models than half of a hundred fifty thousand models.
Besides, the whole "it's good for you, but we're not letting our own kids near 'em" is pretty hard to swallow and smacks of colonialism.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I predicted this failure when they started the idea.
A lot of people predicted this failure. Including OLPC's competitors.
It's pretty cool. My son loves it but it's slow and there are a few other problems, no need to relive them.
The annoying thing is that it was pretty difficult to get one. I was only able to get one if I bought another for someone else, I don;t mind, but really - if you want to drive volume...
And even then I was only able to get one for a limited special offer period.
I can't help but think that so many things would have been different if they had spent an extra $2 on a faster ARM processor and sold them more openly. More XOs in more hands would have yielded more involvement.
Nullius in verba
A 200$ netbook is coming soon and it will run Ubuntu.
And yeah, 200$ not 400$ via "buy two donate one".
The Raven
So, they had a problem with half of the staff being too big? Sheesh, I'd hate to be a 6ft+ OLPC employee right now. Do they amputate at the knees, or what?
... and then they built the supercollider.
I've always thought the problem with the OLPC project was that it developed a product for very young children, when computer literacy is a afterthought for early primary students in the developed world (at least in the US) and in contries where classrooms may not have books or basic utilities, having computers for these kids is simply not worth the cost, and for older children the platform is severely lacking what a "normal" computer is capable of.
From spending time with teachers in early primary ed, non-computer alternatives such as the Leap Pad is specifically designed to teach children to read or do math and are very easy to "plug" into the state cirriculm. When students do go to the computer lab, they either need to buy specialized software, which is expensive to teach them the cirriculm, or just have the kids goof off in MS paint or playing web-games (which is not entirely bad, but less important and effective than other teaching methods). When you can't read and can't do subtraction, being able to draw pictures on a computer is very low on the list of priorities. Because of this, it makes me think the OLPC product out of the box isn't going to be sufficent for real learning, in particular where web access is non-existent or slow/hap-hazard or not in the native language; particularly for young children whom the project seems to be aimed at.
I think the project would have done much more good by producting computers with a standard Linux desktop, OO.org, Firefox, etc... (maybe toned-down versions to run on less RAM/HD space) and marketed them to middle-and-high school age students, particularly those academic performance would make them able to potentially go to university or have a "office job". When I see employees and students (when I am teaching) who can barely use OO.org because they "learned on Word" or can't find their files "on a PC because I have a Mac", it leads me to believe having the Sugar UI, as neat as it is, makes it so different from a computer they'll use in higher-ed or in the workplace that what they are learning isn't going to be nearly as effective. If Windows is the only way to turn an OLPC into a "normal" computer then it seems worth it, even though I'd rather see it loaded with OSS to save the schools money and give them exposure to Linux which is becoming a very popular desktop OS in the developing world in particular. I know some will say "keep it Sugar and let them dump Linux on it", but can you imagine what it would take to re-configure thousands of these machines, let alone creating an install that meets its hardware available? It would be cheaper to buy the machines preloaded with Windows versus all that effort, particularly if MS is practically giving it away. Sometimes ideology is only worth so much when you're strapped to make it happen.
$100 for a machine that is a glorified chat client when the participants are in the same room or an electronic coloring book seems very wasteful when you think of how many crayons, texts, papers and pens that machine is worth to the poorest of poor students. $100 for a real computer to teach college bound students how to be successful and familar with the workplaces requirements, seems like a deal, so long as it is implemented wisely and at a time in the students development where it is going to be worth it. It feels like giving an OLPC to a kid before 4th grade is like giving a violin to a baby.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
The OLPC is a noble idea, but I think Negroponte has underestimed the the will of its competitors to ensure OLPC doesn't take hold to give them a clear advantage.
Actually, very few people seem to even understand Negroponte's real idea. The OLPC had no competitors. It was an education project, not a product. It was never about selling a novel hardware device; that was just a means to an end. Unfortunately, there had never been a similar project to set a precedent, so the press and analysts could only view it in terms that they understood: the terms of the U.S. consumer technology industry. As such, it looked as if the OLPC would have to "compete" with cheapie laptops from Intel, Asus, or whomever, despite the fact that none of these later offerings really had the same goals as the OLPC. I think far more damning to the OLPC was the fact that when it shipped it couldn't actually deliver on the project's goals. When you're asking a government to spend a few million dollars on mass orders of a piece of technology, "someday this will set you free" doesn't sound half as good as "turn it on and it runs Windows."
Breakfast served all day!
My reaction is the same as the first time I heard about this "PC." Why would these impoverished nations spend $100 per machine, when what the kids need are books, pencils and a roof on their school so classes aren't cancelled - Or shoes, so they can walk to school in the first place. If we in the west want to make a difference, instead of buying a $250 PC-toy at Wal-Mart we should give our $100 to a charity that can help with some of the above issues and stop worrying about whether they ran Windows or Linux or used the wrong flavour of WiFi.
BoycottNovell is an amazing organization.
That is, amazing in how insane they are. They are the epitome of the knee-jerk crowd that taints open source. They and DefectiveByDesign (hello, Genius Bar Invasion bullshit) are the two that come to mind when I think of people doing a lot to hurt the causes they say they're for.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
and ofcourse it helped alot to have Intel chasing behind OLPC with promises of a far far better laptop without actually doing it. FYI, the Classmate is not even a close comparison to the XO.
It also was a big help when Microsoft went around to the governments of many of the countries the OLPC had publicly listed as giving MoU's and was kind enough to find millions of dollars to invest in these governments to 'help them' with their computer technologies. You know, like how Egypt signed on with Microsoft for around $25 million and then when OLPC went back to them, all they would ask is "does it run Windows".
Naw, it was all the OLPC peoples fault 100%. Chalk up another one for big business stomping on innovation and progress. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The problem wasn't MSFT, or even the underpowered hardware. The problem was Negroponte and his elitist bullshit. He COULD have gotten the economies of scale on his side by selling them to the first world and using his profits to drive down production costs. Instead he tried that forced charity bullshit with the G1G1 program. I originally thought the OLPC was a great idea. His idea of having laptops for all the world's children to learn on was great. But sadly it quickly became all the third world's children and the first world could pay for it. Has he never been to the delta? Seen the kids with books from the Carter administration who live in tar paper shacks? If he would have sold them to the first world he could have helped out a lot of kids here while ramping up production.
And as much as I hate to agree with Twitter on ANYTHING, putting XP on it was a majorly stupid idea. Not only did the run off the FLOSS guys that were writing the code and fixing the bugs, they seemed to have forgotten one simple problem with XP. I have run Xp Pro, Home, WinFLP, and even XP embedded. And the one thing they have in common is they LOVE the swap. And with the OLPC having a small SSD that is a recipe for disaster. And then add on top of that the fact that the OLPC doesn't have enough room for the huge amounts of updates required to secure XP, that it doesn't have the CPU or RAM resources to run an AV or firewall, so the machines will get turned into spambots the second they hook to the net, and finally by putting XP they have destroyed the original intent of the machine.
It was SUPPOSED to be a machine for teaching kids. You know, school work, spelling, math, and to allow them to work together on educational programs through the mesh network. By putting XP what you have done is turn the OLPC into a really shitty Windows Office machine. IIRC all the XP machines get is XP and Office. What the hell good is that? Is there a pressing need to teach third world kids how to make powerpoints? I only hope that when the OLPC goes out of business, which they will, that some enterprising company buys up the plans and productions facilities. Because with the economies of scale it could be a great laptop for ALL the world's children. But as long as Negroponte is at the helm, it is going nowhere but downhill.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It made a slow machine even slower and it certainly doesn't encourage practical computer skills.
The slow part is very true. If you launch a good old X11 app via Terminal they will start pretty much instantly, while even a hello-world Sugar app will take near to 10 seconds to start. However I don't buy the 'computer skill' part, Sugar really is not that different, in fact I see most of it to be pretty much the same, the Journal is analog to your average desktop search, an Activity is pretty much just an application, you have copy&paste and plenty of other stuff usual stuff. Having windows launched always in fullscreen really doesn't change much.
Where I think Sugar broke is in backward compatibility, not running Microsoft Windows, ok thats fine, since Linux is rather mature today and free, but Sugar doesn't run Linux application either, it requires special coded Sugar applications. Sugar doesn't have a way to handle normal Linux apps or even normal filesystems, its all their own little version of how the world should be without any way to interoperate with other systems or applications aside from the Terminal Activity. And thats just fatal considering that most of Sugar is just not quite finished and some of it might never be (i.e. no IDE for actually developing new Sugar application is in Sugar).
I agree about the elitest attitude, although I think that Sugar was almost as bad as XP. I tried it last year and it was terrible.
As for what the OLPC was supposed to be for... I don't think anyone ever really decided. Every time I've brought up what it was for, I have been lambasted that I had it all wrong. So, I went to their website, and all I could find was a bunch of Dilbert style buzzword bingo.
If as you say, it was intended to be an educational tool for things like spelling, math and to work together, then the mesh network was a horrible idea. In fact the entire project was over engineered from the get go. I could easily build a computer for math, spelling and simple programming for under $100 at single unit retail pricing. Even adding the criteria that it would run from a hand crank and be MORE durable than the OLPC. REAL engineers with access to bulk wholesale pricing should be able to do far better than me.
Personally, I think the OLPC was just a way to get free R&D by convincing people that the money they were donating was for charity.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I disagree about the elitist attitude. Since when is intelligence and the application of knowledge considered elitists on a nerd/geek forum, lest keep the idiotic redneck point of view on myspace et al where it belongs, the elitists are the rich, greedy and pseudo celebrities. So Nicholos kicked off the OLPC which focused some real attention on bridging the global digital divide and the importance of being able to provide accessible low cost computing to make the knowledge of the world available to the children of the world.
As it is the OLPC really helped to kick off the growth of Linux on netbooks and establish it it as the future of education for children upon a global basis. As for the future of the OLPC well M$ did put the kybosh on it that by whispering sweet 'nothings' into Nicholos's ear with the intent of souring the project because of course low cost PCs in the hundred dollar range is the death of an operating system, office suite combination that basically quadruples the fully function cost of that hardware.
So the OLPC project brought focus to the problem and did it's job in demonstrating what could be done and now a range of hardware software solutions are evolving to provide the needed solution, low cost netbooks with a FOSS software stack for the education market.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If you don't run the Mac OS, you are not who the Genius Bar serves. Harrassing employees is extremely disrespectful IMHO. If you got me, I would have said, "You can run Ubuntu in Parallels, X comes with every copy of the Mac OS X, and many Linux distros do not support EFI out of the box."
--Sam
no, what was elitist was the entire concept. money that could have been spent on teachers, reducing classroom sizes, improved school infrastructure was being asked to be diverted into gadgets for children when it has NOT been proven that putting gadgets in the hands of children in first world countries has been a magical solution at all. far from it, every attempt to add computers into classrooms in the us has been a botched failure based on fear and ignorance. millions of wasted tax payer money funding children playing oregon trail, playing ridiculous math games and such on expensive hardware. teaching children amount "guis and mice" and how to type when such skills are easily picked up by the new generation without such classes, the fears were totally unfounded. it is not a cost effective way to spend education budgets in the first world, never mind the developing world. now basically every child has access to a computer in the western world, whether at home or the library/school lab. are all these children coding genius's because this access? lol, what actually happens when you get tech into childrens hands is that it becomes a communications toy. myspace, facebook, youtube whatever. now these things are fine, but asking for developing countries governments to fund universal access to such stuff is ridiculous.
Apparently you are new to the conversation. Nobody says that spreading knowledge is what makes them elitist. What makes them elitists is that they were not going to soil their exclusive clientel by allowing those dirty first world kids to buy one, even if that means the 3rd world kids cannot get the benefit of economies of scale. When they did offer the OLPC in the 1st world, they were not going to let those dirty 1st worlders soil their holy work by letting them just buy one. If they are not willing to donate a machine to the 3rd world, then they are not worthy to be part of the OLPC club. Even if that means that 3rd world kids cannot get the benefit of economies of scale.
I could personally build a rugged hand powered computer for under $100 from single unit retail priced parts, but the OLPC group thought that wired networking and 8 bit processors were beneath them. If they were going to make a machine, it wasn't going to be a rugged really low cost machine. It was going to be a machine that made the 1st world envious, even if that meant that the 3rd world couldn't really afford it.
The OLPC group were elitist because they were not going to soil their hands with FOSS software that already exists, and would run just fine on the hardware they built. No, they insisted that they could write a better desktop than the ones with hundreds of thousands of man hours already put into them.
No, MS and Intel did not kill the OLPC. The OLPC is dieing because instead of building a machine that would bring computing to the 3rd world, they built a machine for well to do Americans and then didn't want to sell them to them. Heck, they would have been better off buying truck loads of Nintendo DSes and R4s than what they did.
So, no, it isn't the spread of knowledge that makes them elitists. It is the fact that they are unwilling to spread that knowledge if it doesn't stroke their ego and make them cool.
Spare me the (often incompetent) enthusiasm of youth.
You shouldn't 'believe' in an OS or license like a God. Nobody should.
I'm probably older than you are, and my opinion is the exact opposite: You should believe in an OS or license or other things that can make a real difference to human life. There's a lot of reasons to be enthusiastic about things that have the potential to move humanity forward. On the other hand, believing in a god, any god, is just plain silly.
In the end computers are just tools.
In the end, emotions and beliefs are what make us human and different from machines.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What makes them elitists is that they were not going to soil their exclusive clientel by allowing those dirty first world kids to buy one, even if that means the 3rd world kids cannot get the benefit of economies of scale
That's not elitist. That's just being stubbornly doctrinal and a bit naive. Frankly, Apple is a bit more elitist, since you've got to have a fair bit of cash to get the hardware. Linux, while not quite elitist, is certainly selective in that you must be more industrious and inquisitive than the average computer user to use it.
Yes, the OLPC project should have simply sold XO units to whom ever had the cash. That's what a for-profit company would have done. Attempting to leverage the wealth of the industrialized nations to support the 3rd world ones isn't such a bad idea. I bought an XO in the first round of G1G1. It was $400, which wasn't an onerous hardship for me at the time.
Why wasn't the G1G1 programming running ALL THE TIME? I still don't understand that at all. It's like these guys wanted to do a soft launch with their hardware.
Negroponte is considered something of a demigod at MIT, having founded the Media Lab. But I do think he executed poorly on this project because of his lack of business experience. I wonder if his brother would have done better.
Frankly, I never did cotton to the Sugar UI (let's stop this talk of it being an OS please). I'm now running Ubuntu on the XO and I'm happier for it. Running XP on the XO hardware will be a joke.
Everything about Negroponte and the OLPC is elitist. The project was doomed to failure from the beginning and the only positive was the creation of the netbook market. They assumed (like do-gooders everywhere) that their good intentions would pave the way to success; now they blame evil bad everyone else when their pipe-dreams turn to shit in the face of reality.
A Thought Experiment: you are the Secretary of Education of a poor, small, rural and backward 3rd world nation with an even smaller budget. Do you:
a) buy quirky, beta-quality hardware running quirky, beta-quality software that is only being peddled to other poor, small, rural and backward third world nations.
OR
b) go with mainstream hardware and mainstream software that does the same things the rest of the world is doing?
You're just as elitist as they are for assuming you know what's best for the aforementioned countries. Pull your head out of your dirty hippie ass - the market is going to win out and a successful OLPC project would seek to harness existing manufacturers rather than bypass them. Did you really think Intel and Microsoft would stand by and watch their paradigm be destroyed? Please note that I am neither defending nor condoning their actions but merely noting their inevitability.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
I can't believe the number of posts here from people claiming how "obvious" it was that the OLPC would never work, and if Negroponte would just fix this or that aspect of the development strategy, the hardware, the software, the pricing, or the partner program, then everything would turn up roses.
There was nothing obvious about the adventures of the OLPC. They were defining an entirely new class of machine that, even now, has no true competitor (and no, none of the current netbook offerings have it right yet: they cost too much, they draw too much power, they can't be used in full daylight, and they aren't nearly rugged enough.)
When you are charting something this new, it attracts the best and brightest. These kind of people have huge egos, that's part of the package. So the fact that there have been lots of sparks flying is no surprise.
When you are trying to change the status quo this completely, it attracts intense opposition from the entrenched competition. I doubt any of us would enjoy putting up with the hammering, back-stabbing, broken promises and endless fight for oxygen that is probably a daily experience for the OLPC executives.
So, I say, cut these people some slack. Go buy a OLPC, and see what all the talk is about. I've been using an OLPC for a year now, and am daily impressed with how very different it is from any other device out there.
When you find yourself reading an ebook, and pass from the deep gloom of a subway station into the direct sunlight without even thinking about the fact that a normal PC can't do that, then you're graduated to the new OLPC world.
When you find yourself grabbing your XO without a case, walking in the rain to your car and throwing it on the back seat without a second thought, then you've graduated to the new OLPC world.
When you find yourself propping your XO up on a bowl in the kitchen so you can browse recipies on the web while you cook, and don't worry for a second about what might happen if you spill something all over it (been there, done that), then you've graduated.
This thing is really different. Give it a chance.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
That was another big problem, they didn't have a clear set of examples of what it was actually FOR. As it was though, it was a glorified netbook.
My country (Uruguay) was the one that invested the heaviest in OLPC (all the school-age kids are getting it), and the main problem is not the computers themselves, or Sugar OS or whatever... it is that there wasn't a plan in place to actually use them for something worthwile (textbooks, etc..).
Teachers are NOT happy about that.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Microsoft and Intel promised cheap laptops with Windows to all countries interested in the OLPC project. Now those countries have neither and will never get anything of course, but at least Microsoft got rid of some more competition.
That's not true.
Windows users of iPods/iPhones are just one example of a non-Mac OS user going for support at a genius bar. They also provide pre-sales advice.
And Parallels is non-free software. I'm kinda glad more things don't support EFI. EFI is pretty terrible for freedom.
Join the Free Software Foundation
I participated in the G1G1 program on the dual basis that I could write software for the platform, and I could do something nice for a third world child. It seems that Microsoft has outsmarted me again. The OLPC is a lousy Windows machine and not worthy of my time to develop software for. My idealistic hope to do something nice for a child has come to unknown results. I can only hope that some child used it to access the Internet for a while, and that in and of itself would have been valuable IMHO. Otherwise I guess I am the owner of an orphan green notebook computer that never was able to access my Apple Airport wifi router because of WPA problems that were never fixed. Keeping a WEP setup just for the OLPC is not worthwhile because of the security implications. As the french would say, se la merde. I am a switcher and no longer write software for Windows, other than accidental compatibility based on Python. I am disappointed I guess that things didn't work out better overall for OLPC, but at least I tried.
Gee, it's almost like all those people who said that just throwing a bunch of laptops at kids isn't going to magically help them actually knew what they were talking about.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Those idiots had no intention of buying Apple products--they were doing it for the hur-hur-hur "nerd cred" that comes from doing something so titanically stupid. The grunts on the ground aren't going to change Apple policy and the people who do wouldn't have even heard of the stupid little stunt. It was an idea conceived of by the basement dwellers and reaffirmed by the echo chamber of fellow gnulots that don't understand how the world actually works (and how that differs from how somebody might want it to work).
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
There are several documented ways to run Linux apps in Sugar.
There are ways to run Linux applications by *bypassing* Sugar, there currently are no ways to run them properly from within Sugar itself or to interact with them properly, since Sugar doesn't support a classic file system. Sugar is a desktop environment that does everything it can to make it hard to run normal applications.
Its good to hear that they are trying to fix that now, but its again a case of "to little, to late", this is something that should have been thought of right from the start. The whole goal to have everything as a proper Sugar app was nice, but just unrealistic. Even those apps that are 'proper' Sugar apps, are quite frequently just wrapped classic Linux applications, that bypass a lot of what Sugar does (eToys, Squeak, etc.).
Oh, and of course the mess works the other way around too, running Sugar applications in a normal Linux system isn't exactly pretty either.