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Negroponte Sees Sugar As OLPC's Biggest Mistake
griffjon writes "In an interview, Nicholas Negroponte claims that the biggest mistake OLPC made was the revolutionary Red Hat-based Sugar desktop environment — instead, he says, they should have built Sugar as an application that ran on a 'vanilla' Linux OS. Some disagree."
Wow, my first thought was he must be on his deathbed and trying to scam his way into heaven. Then, I saw the first name.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The biggest OLPC mistake was Negroponte.
Things whent downhill the second they started working with MS.
Seriously, they should have stuck to ultra-cheap durable laptops, rather then try to cater to MS's Windows. They lost their focus and thats the end of them.
shithead who decided microsoft windows simply MUST run on the OLPC in 60 days?? and now his professional evaluation of the open source operating environment he wanted to replace is that it sould have been sitting atop vanilla linux??
whats left? a big bold redmond boilerblate on the case that says "fuck you red-hat" with clippy waving the bird?!
Good people go to bed earlier.
First, advertising it at first as a $100 laptop was a mistake...it's stupid to announce a price before you figure out what your cost structure is going to look like.
Second, and more importantly, the distribution plan was flawed. Their big idea was to sell this thing to the governments of third world countries, despite the fact that most third world countries are led by corrupt governments that have little money, and use what money they do have to grease the palms of the inner circle of the government. Most charitable organizations learned decades ago that trying to get corrupt governments interested in doing something for the interest of their poorest citizens is a recipe for failure.
What they should have done is sold these things to charities that already work in these areas and have knowledge of the difficulties involved and would know where the greatest need is. They should have been dumping these things on charities as fast as they could take them, but instead they were busy trying to get these governments to distribute them, thereby assuring they were only going to be going to countries with relatively stable governments with experience delivering large-scale deployments of things like electrical power to their residents. This means the people that would get them were the ones least likely to benefit.
Third, they didn't do enough to get the American public interested in the project...sure, there were a bunch of stories in tech rags about how cool this was going to be and how no one could get them unless they were a poor person in a third world country, but that was it. This meant the people most likely to have the spare cash to donate to this cause didn't know enough about it, and never had a chance to get their hands on one except through the short-lived "buy one, get one" program.
The Internet is fast becoming what electrical power was 50 years ago: It separates the people who are able to participate in the global economy from those who can't. The so-called "digital divide" has been largely closed in this country, but it remains a huge problem globally. The OLPC program is and has been a great idea with a piss-poor implementation plan.
When your customized system takes 2-3 times as long to boot as Windows on the same hardware, you probably have made a mistake. Maybe next time don't write it all in python.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Develop thicker skin. You don't throw out all the good stuff just because you find one element offensive. If the U.S. government had told Von Braun to fuck off on his rocket ideas just because he used slave labor in his factories and was a SS officer, we wouldn't be celebrating the Apollo landing anniversary today.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The big mistake OLPC made was Nicholas Negroponte. He's too much into his own self-importance. His thing was dealing at the national leader level and getting himself into the press. What was needed was somebody who knew how to get a low-cost product out the door and sell it in quantity.
The OLPC should have been in a bubble-pack in every Wal-Mart and Walgreens in America, in every souk in the Middle East, and in every market in India, selling at a small profit and dropping in price every three months. But no, Negroponte had to try to make big deals with governments. That might have happened after they actually had the product out there in volume.
It's vexing for users to switch from MacOS to Windows, or from Windows to MacOS, and both have long-established, entrenched interfaces that they are all *very* slow to change. Windows still has it's "X" window kill switch in the top right corner, etc.
Right, because we all know the villages in Africa must all be using Windows XP and every kid knows how to use them. Sure when marketing this to the first world, you must keep that in mind, but that isn't the goal of OLPC. The goal is to take children who have only heard of computers, perhaps have seen a computer, but don't know how to use one. You aren't taking the average guy who works with Windows at work, uses Windows at home and giving him the Sugar UI, you are taking a poor kid with no knowledge of computers and giving them a computer.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
> However, in terms of the OLPC goal, they should of gotten on their knees and begged for Windows XP.
No, that is a loser. Enslaving another generation to Redmond's crappy insecure products isn't doing anyone a favor. But anyone with a room temp IQ could have told ya Sugar was a sure loser.
1. It LOOKED like something Fisher Price (or perhaps VTech) would sell. Now FP does know a thing or two about building products for children so that isn't totally meant as an insult. But it made it damned hard to pitch the thing as a 'real' laptop.
2. It is only now approaching a stable state. Long after it's window of opportunity (at least in the OLPC project) is closed. The lesson here is that building a laptop 'from scratch' is a lot simpler than building an entire new user inteface and applications suite from scratch.
Then there were the additional mistakes of OLPC:
1. As others have noted, pitching a "$100 laptop' and then failing to deliver anywhere in the ballpark is an instant credibility killer.
2. Failing to understand that cutting both Intel and Microsoft out was going to make it all but impossible to sell to corrupt third world governments. It doesn't mean you can't do it but you damned well better have a real plan for dealing with that reality. If OLPC had any such plan it was to wave the Penguin banner to force Microsoft to give cut rate pricing. But it isn't even clear they were even thinking that much.
Democrat delenda est
If you give a child a laptop, it'll last a few years. If you teach a child to use open source software, you've given her technology for a lifetime.
Ultimately, the hardware is going to be a trivial part of this project. We've already seen the price of commercial laptops (netbooks) come very close to the $100 price point on its own, and it's going to get cheaper. The value of software is much more stable. Whatever a spreadsheet program was worth to me in 1999, it's worth the same thing to me today. Especially if it's open source, which means that I've got the latest version without shelling out another $500. How much do you think the laptop I bought in 1999 is worth today?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Can you actually cite some numbers here? How much money is being made in the FOSS world vs. in the MS Windows third-party software world? If my livelihood depended on it as an indie developer, I'd probably not pick either, but rather target the iPhone or some other niche where I could get better distribution and where advertising dollars might go further.
E pluribus unum
The meta-idea of rethinking UI from the ground up, and building something specifically directed at kids, was a wonderful idea. Frankly, the reason I bought a G1G1 machine was that I hoped to experience a fresh and wonderful user interface.
I think Sugar was a sad failure. I don't quite know what to make of the obvious riposte that I don't belong to the target audience. But an awful lot of the official Sugar documentation seemed to me to make too much use of "proof by repeated assertion." A file system organized primarily by recency (the Journal) instead of space (the Apple pre-OS-X Finder) or nested hierarchy (pre-GUI)? Wow, what a strange idea. What a fresh idea. I couldn't imagine how it could work, but all these people said it did, so after giving up on imagining it I paid $400 to experience it. Well, it sure didn't work for me.
And the claim that it works for kids because they "naturally describe what they are doing"--sorry, I just don't believe nine-year-old kids are going to type text tags and descriptions into every Journal entry so that they can find them again. Subject to correction by anyone who's actually watched real nine-year-olds playing with an XO and seen them tag and describe Journal entries, but the last several times I asked this online nobody said they had.
UI design seems to me to have peaked sometime in the early 1980s, when computer companies still needed to seduce laypersons who weren't already trained on computer usage. As "computer literacy" became more and more of a career necessity, computer companies were able to get away with more and more complexity. For me, an important downward turning point occurred when Microsoft violated Apple's UI guidelines, which stated that documents should always re-open with the insertion point positioned where it was when the document was closed--a special instance of the principle that things should stay where you put them. Microsoft couldn't be bothered; with Word, like Sisyphus, you always start with your insertion point once again having rolled down to the bottom of the hill. Other companies, eventually including Apple, followed suit, and this minor but significant point of UI design was lost, along with many others.
A fresh look at UI design is desperately needed. UI design is now in the hands of power-user snobs who revel in their ability to handle complexity. Ordinary people resign themselves to forever feeling that "I'm just a dummy when it comes to computers." The world desperately needs a user interface so simple a child could use it. A pity that Sugar isn't it.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
``The key to it all is that kids own their machine, so all the admin stuff (networking, power management, etc.) *needs* to work within a consistent, simple GUI.``
That view, and the Sugar UI FWIW, stem from a completely flawed understanding of children. Kids are inherently quick at learning and highly adaptable. Give them a Linux or a Windows UI and they'll thrive, taking that knowledge with them and building on it to adulthood.
What Sugar did was try to lock them in a world of Fisher Price toy simplicity, as if they were intellectually retarded. None of the UI knowledge of Sugar would benefit them later. It thoroughly deserved to fail.
I am in an excellent position to evaluate this issue, having purchased one of the first XO OLPCs through the give-one-get-one (GOGO) program for an 11 year old child, and then obtained an Asus Eee PC netbook running Xandros Linux (a window-ized interface to Debian Linux, along the lines of Ubuntu).
The 11-year old's verdict: thumbs down for Sugar, thumbs-up for Xandros. She gave up with fiddling on the XO after a few weeks, but loves to use the Eee PC. As the network support resource for my household, I can further point out that Sugar shipped with unusable wireless security (WEP only), which some months later was upgraded to WPA, but with this fatal flaw: every time the computer is powered up the user has to reenter the entire passphrase to get wireless access. Since a rather lengthy and obscure passphrase had been previously selected to provide household network security, this was an intolerable nuisance to an 11-year old. And dumbing-down the household security for the convenience of one cheap product is unacceptable to this network support resource.
Perhaps the passphrase remembering problem has since been fixed (since the XO is not used by its target audience any more I am not inclined to upgrade the OS to test it) but it illustrates the fatal problem with the Sugar approach: writing a decent OS is hard work, and taking a quick and dirty stab at it gives a foundation of sand for the whole offering. Absolutely they should have run a solid robust proven OS (Linux) for the system, adding on what ever they felt was needed.,/p>
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Personally, I think their biggest mistake was not selling it to first world consumers. I know a lot of people who would have liked to buy one, but couldn't. This was a fatal mistake since their plan required being able to produce large enough amounts of these to be able to sell them cheaply, and they were turning away the people who were willing and able to buy at the time.
I think this is only a symptom of the biggest mistake, which was a flawed vision of how this project needed to work. Negroponte thought he could swan into the offices of big-time politicians in third-world countries and just talk them into buying these computers en masse, even while he insisted they were not really computers (and could not run Windows) but educational tools. Educational tools? At $100 a head (and climbing)? How many of these countries are investing $100 per student to build schools? What's more, how well has this model ever worked for vaccines, or malaria nets, or cooking stoves? The only way Western countries have managed to bring these things to the poorest people of the world is for independent charities to strap on their boots and go deliver them by hand. Governments are not going to do it for you.
Further, and more to your point, so you put a $199 laptop into the hands of a child of a family that doesn't earn $199 in six months. What then? How much is that kid going to learn about computer programming, open source, and all that other good stuff, when the fields need to be ploughed? One of the main reasons people in third-world countries have lots of kids is that they need them, particularly in areas where people are regularly knocked out of commission by malaria for half the year. So how long is it going to be before that family sells the OLPC?
And then what? Exactly. The OLPC ends up in the hands of ... someone who can afford to buy it. This is Negroponte's real biggest mistake: Denying the basic forces of economics.
If, on the other hand, he had put them into every Wal-Mart -- or screw that, Walgreen's -- and every souk and ever bazaar, in the teeming millions, it might have had a shot. The only way to counteract the economic forces in the poorer regions is for not just the cost, but the value of the device to be low... and the only way to do that is to bump up supply. Keep focused on making the devices virtually ubiquitous, as commonplace as bicycles. In short, the OLPC project needed a lot more people on board and a lot more money backing it. It needed the participation of international charities and it needed to be subsidized by people buying the devices here (at a "novelty" markup, even).
Instead, they went with the "I just need to go shake hands with Nice General Abouda, and he'll help us out" model. Seems like a recipe for failure, to me.
Breakfast served all day!