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OLPC 2.0 — One Laptop Foundation Reboots
Greg Huang writes "In early January, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation laid off half its staff and shed work on the Sugar graphical interface. Now, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and president Chuck Kane for the first time detail the foundation's new plans, describe how the XO laptop will do what netbooks can't do, and share their hope to keep working with Sugar developer Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year."
Stop vaporising this dead horse.
Now based on a discontined CPU, and renamed because they never hit the price target; hijacked by Microsoft's department of evil, I really think they need to give up.
In the 2007 holiday season ... the [G1G1] program took in $37 million. This past season, the foundation partnered with Amazon to sell the laptops and increased its advertising and marketing efforts substantially--to two or three times what they were in 2007, or close to $20 million, virtually all of it pro bono. Yet, sales fell off a cliff, coming in at about $2.5 million. Negroponte attributes "almost all" of the falloff to the poor economy, though others have theorized that the computers themselves had lost their appeal.
The fact that the second G1G1 failed despite significant marketing to the public-at-large, whereas the first G1G1 succeeded using only word-of-mouth and grass-roots marketing is quite telling. I'm sure there are many reasons (including the economy), but I believe the shift in values of the OLPC organization was a significant effect. I was super-keen to participate in the first G1G1 program: both because I felt I was helping an organization aligned with my ideals (free distribution of knowledge; free software, etc.) and because I felt that I was buying-in to a vibrant community (because all kinds of hackers and kids would be programming fun stuff for the platform).
But then I felt let-down by the changes in OLPC. The switch in emphasis (including the shift to Windows) meant that many enthusiasts and volunteers lost interest. And this devalued the whole platform to many people, since it seemed like the community was disappearing (or least fracturing and changing). So I stopped 'spreading the word', advocating for them, and didn't participate in the second G1G1. I'm sure many others felt as I did.
Obviously 1st-world enthusiasts and hackers are not the target audience for the XO. And yet I believe they were quite important in building and supporting the platform ($37 million from the first G1G1 is quite impressive), and that by neglecting that community OLPC has lost some of its most useful supporters. (Then again, I could be totally wrong; wouldn't be the first time someone over-estimated the influence they had on a particular sequence of events.)
So who needs this OLPC stuff?
Off the top of my head:
The cheap eee PC laptops still don't serve those purposes. They probably never will, since it is a very specialized and likely unprofitable market.
the thing last 3 hours on normal use
That's just not true. In full backlight mode and WiFi you might get 3 hours on the OLPC, but in black and white outdoor sunlight readable mode, in ebook mode without WiFi, you get 12 hours on the OLPC while netbooks get below 2 hours with a similar sized battery.
Fact is OLPC chose a lower capacity battery using a new type of technology which, doesn't pollute, doesn't explode (like netbook batteries potentially do), and most importantly the OLPC battery lifetime is much longer. A normal netbook Lithium-Ion battery lowers it's capacity already afte 500 recharge cycles, after about 1500 charge cycles, a normal netbook lithium-ion battery usually is totally dead. While the OLPC battery keeps its charge capacity for moe than 5000 recharge cycles. Which means the same OLPC can last more than 5 years with the same battery capacity while netbook batteries last only about 1-2 years.