Ivan Krstić Says Negroponte's Wrong About Sugar and OLPC

Not many days ago, we mentioned ZDNet's interview with Nicholas Negroponte, in which Negroponte had some harsh things to say about Sugar and its connection to the slower-than-hoped uptake of the XO. Ivan Krstic (formerly head of the OLPC's security innovative subsystem) responded to Negroponte's claims, which he says are "nonsense." Among other things, he mentions that Sugar "was the name for the new learning-oriented graphical interface that OLPC was building, but it was also the name for the entire XO operating system, one tiny part of which was Sugar the GUI, and the rest of which was mostly Fedora Linux."

Comments

entirely not the problem

[wizardforce]

Correct. The XO's problem isn't sugar or as far as I can see really anything to do with its specifications but rather how it was sold and marketed.

Re:entirely not the problem

[StreetStealth]

Getting OLPC off the ground was a huge undertaking whose backers did not all share the same vision.

The whole point of Sugar was to make the XO a universal, personal educational computing device, free of the cultural barriers and prejudices that are inherent in something like Windows. The people who pursued this vision of OLPC were the idealists.

Then there were, to use a generous term, the pragmatists. They didn't see the use in building a new, universal education platform. To them, the developing world may well have just been millions of children waiting to grow up to work at offshore call centers, and getting them familiar with The Way The World Works was the first priority.

Obviously, the latter won, and to be honest, I don't think their tamer, "more realistic" vision of OLPC will ever make the same mark on the world that a Sugar-powered XO would have.

Re:entirely not the problem

[Darkness404]

The problem was the unwillingness to tap the first world. Back in 2007 you can bet that the would would have somewhat embraced a laptop that cost only $230, even if the specs were somewhat pathetic. Add that into the fact the machine is nearly indestructible and can be read in sunlight and you would have had a fast selling machine and made $30 on top of it. But of course the OLPC said no to that and instead came up with "give one get one" where for $400 you could effectively get the same laptop and make a $200 contribution to the OLPC fund. Hm, would I rather buy a $400 durable laptop that has about the same specs as my ancient PIII locked in my basement that I never use, or buy a laptop with a decent CPU and a usable amount of RAM.

Just look at how well the iPod touch sold and it cost $300 in the same time period and at launch had 0 apps. An iPod touch with a keyboard would have sold very well when priced even lower. The unwillingness to sell the OLPC computers to the first world was a huge mistake.

Alternative

[Toonol]

I think they should have looked more toward the Nintendo DS as inspiration, honestly. That thing can survive in 3rd world countries no problem; it survives 8 year olds. It's powerful enough to browse, the touch screen allows for a ubiquitous interface; just add a stripped-down linux and allow it to read/run from external memory SD and USB drives.

Wingnut

[Improv]

A far bigger problem than Sugar, if sugar is even a problem, is having a wingnut leading the company. Negroponte's most visible activity wrt the OLPC is to torpedo it. Ditching him would be a much better start than ditching sugar.

Re:Feature creep killed the XO

[Locutus]

IIRC, they didn't do _that_ much for Microsoft and pretty much just added the SD card. But, they did let Microsoft take up their time and even some of their office space. It really wasn't an easy hardware kit to build considering it was supposed to work outside, by kids, and be very energy thrifty. Nobody has even come close to what the XO does and only the Kindle can be read outside in full sunlight.

The Microsoft stuff misdirected the marketing of the project once it was determined that Microsoft and Intel successfully blocked many of the sales they had MOU's for.

LoB

sugar wasn't the problem

[Ephemeriis]

I don't think sugar was the main problem.

Negroponte couldn't seem to make up his mind on the device. First it was supposed to be small, cheap, and completely open-source/user-modifiable. Part of the point was to make the entire platform a learning experience.

Then the hardware specs started changing to make room for Windows... Why exactly? Who knows... Microsoft wanted a piece of the pie, and Negroponte accommodated them.

But then the device wasn't nearly so cheap, and the entire platform wasn't an open learning experience. The cost lost them a few customers... And the lack of openness lost them a few more...

And the marketing? Horrible.

There are plenty of netbooks out there now... Stuff from MSI and Dell and HP... Some ship with Windows, some ship with Linux... They're selling just fine. There's no reason the XO couldn't have been a successful product.

A lot of things combined to kill the XO

[jmorris42]

A lot of things came together to kill XO.

1. Sugar. It still isn't ready for primetime. Building a whole new UI proved a lot harder than designing a laptop for the 3rd world. But worse, Sugar LOOKED like a toy instead of a computer. Basically it was a PR failure even had it been ready to deploy in time.

2. x86. Unless the whole goal was teasing Microsoft into cheap licenses by waving the Penguin flag there was no reason to put an x86 into it. The power problem would have been so much simpler with ARM and the Sugar stack would have ran equally well on it.

3. Failure to understand the customers. The customers were never going to be the children. Neither was it going to be the educators who would have to relearn pretty much everthing to adopt them. The customers were third world kleptocrats.

4. Failure to clearly convey the whole new educational method XO implied and to get any buyin on it. Yes we on /. got it but most MSM reporting on it failed to get it even in the US.

Re:A lot of things combined to kill the XO

[FourthAge]

5. They wanted to create an experimental "mesh" networking system to get all the OLPCs online. This is at least as difficult as making an entirely new UI, perhaps more so.

6. They refused to leverage existing application software, preferring instead to reinvent every wheel for their Sugar system. This was an incredibly bad idea. Compatibility with existing Linux apps should have been a priority to make up for the things that the Sugar apps couldn't initially do.

7. Generally: the project ran on wishful thinking. They set crazily ambitious goals and totally underestimated the time, money and human effort required to achieve them. Intel and Microsoft didn't need to move to kill the project, it would have withered away anyway because of the vast discrepancy between Negroponte's dreams and his abilities. The fact that they tried anyway shows how well the PR machine worked. It was the only aspect of OLPC that was in any way successful. Unless OLPC can claim credit for the netbook revolution, which is doubtful to say the least.

Finally - I expect, if it had been ARM-based, then Microsoft would have been pushing WinCE. However, it is a myth that ARM CPUs are lower power than x86. The instruction set architecture has little or no relevance to power consumption. It's all about the materials used to build the CPU core.

Re:True

[westlake]

Part of OLPC had always been that the entire software stack could be modified, and that users could learn about it and share ideas to make their own platform better.

The Afghan girl risks her life learning how to read and write.

It is the basics of a grade school education which transform and modernize a society.

In these simple things are the roots of independence, power and survival.

That is where your focus needs to be.

The geek builds a machine that reflects his own needs and values and thinks that he has created something universal.

Re:Feature creep killed the XO

[MacTO]

Feature creep killed the XO, but it had nothing to do with the Microsoft lobby. A few things to consider:

The XO was originally intended to be a replacement for textbooks. It was not intended to serve as a general purpose computer. This feature creep meant that the XO needed additional hardware, higher performance hardware, and experimental hardware. None of this feature creep had anything to do with Microsoft. If you ever used Sugar on the XO, you would be more than aware of this because the performance is substandard. Not only is the system slow due to running interpreted software on a slower CPU, but the software is prone to failure due to there being insufficient memory. (There is no swap space, and two Activities will easily consume all of the RAM.) In other words, and internal desire for more features meant that the hundred dollar laptop would never cost a hundred dollars to build and that the software would never be reliable.

Just to re-iterate, the failure of the XO has positively nothing to do with Microsoft. It did not significantly alter the design of the XO. Nor did it significantly alter the software development process on the XO. About all that it did do was cause some in-fighting between bystanders who would never contribute to the project in the first place.

Yeah, whatever

[coryking]

. Look at it this way - if kids grew up in Africa, South Asia, and South America with XOs, they'd grow up with a clear alternative to buying MS and Intel products when they wanted computing power

OLPC failed, in part, because they went out of the way to please people like you rather then their potential customers. You aren't their customer, you are an arm-chair quarterback. All you have done is added a thick layer of zealotry and politics that have zero place in the business OLPC was in.

I know this isn't going to make me popular in these parts, but at first I was excited when I heard about OLPC until I read their mission statement. The second I read "Free Software" and "GPL", I knew they were horribly unfocused and would eventually fail. The politics of Free Software(tm) have no place in a non-profit that was supposed to put computers in the hands of children. Pushing those goals in parallel with trying to build a computer from scratch, put together an operating system from scratch, putting together a whole new method of education, and *finally* convincing governments to buy said devices from said organization was asking for way to much. Adding "GPL" and all the baggage that goes with it did nothing but bring out the trolls and zealots and stole only shred of focus the company might have had.

Sadly, my prediction was 100% correct. Had they been merely a non-profit trying to put laptops into the hands of kids in developing nations, while they wouldn't have been on slashdot or any other linux rag much, they probably would have had a much better chance to fulfill their mission. A shame, really.