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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."
In particular, trying to cram yet more hardware into it to meet the demands of the Microsoft lobby.
If they'd just made the widget, put it into production, and focused on the sales, they would have made a difference.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Who is Ivan Krstić? Is he related to Little Bobby Tables?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
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.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Just before the netbook explosion too... which started out Linux... until MS squashed that threat... in America at least.
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.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I'm not a big fan of Negroponte, but both Intel and Microsoft went out of their way to kill this project -- telling outrageous lies to potential developing-world customers in order to put them off it. When did either of them make a product with a fraction of the innovation and convenience that the XO exhibits? Negroponte did a deal with the Devil in order to keep the thing afloat, and it went wrong on him, as deals with the Devil usually do. But the fact that two gigantic for-profit corporations were so greedy that they were prepared to kill a charitable little startup just on the off-chance that it might deny them a few low-margin sales, is simply disgraceful. If they'd had any heart at all, they'd have said, "Great! How can we help?" and turned it into a big PR bonus for themselves.
Mind you, it doesn't surprise me coming from Microsoft; I've had dealings with them in the past. But I thought better of Intel.
I piss off bigots.
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.
Democrat delenda est
Quit posting about OLPC being a failure. It is absolutely not.
Thanks to OLPC, we have soon 50 million netbooks in rich countries.
Thanks to OLPC, children have soon millions of cheap lower power laptops in poor countries.
Thanks to OLPC, the PC/Laptop industry's interpretation of Moore's law has totally been reshaped, every 18month now PC/laptops will be half the price instead of 2x more powerful and with 2x more bloatware.
Sure, I would have been happier, and so would most other Linux geeks if OLPC had shipped 100 million laptops to poor children by now, and not just 1 million units. Reason for that not happening yet in multi-hundred million scales though are several:
1. Intel will do anything it can not to be killed off by a non-profit laptop technology revolution. Including abusing of monopolistic situations and corrupting politicians.
2. AMD is not much interested in helping OLPC succeed in lowering the cost of laptops and PCs. Lower cost also means less profits and margins for AMD, and AMD has enough problems with profits and margins as it is.
Looking forward, to reach those 100 million poor children sooner rather than later:
1. OLPC needs to find an alternative to AMD as soon as possible. VIA is planned for XO-1.5 which could hopefully ship a few millions of units in a few months time, if VIA supports this move of OLPC creating a cheaper and lower power market using their processor. XO-1.5 could reach the $150 pricepoint soon and enable dozens of commercial netbooks using the VIA processor and also copying on the way OLPC is using the VIA processor.
2. OLPC needs to implement the worlds best ARM processor based laptops for XO-2 working with Google to implement the so called Chrome OS on those. Cloud computing can work also for places without stable internet access, HTML5 supports offline web apps and offline databases. OLPC needs to push Google to make it work on WiFi Mesh networks as well. XO-2 can start at $100 when released and reach the $50 price point, when manufactured using any of half a dozen ARM processor companies chips. All of TI, Qualcomm, Marvell, Freescale, Nvidia and Samsung, all those ARM processors should fit in the XO-2 design. Competition will bring the prices down faster.
I think the part you are thinking of is the part where, any criticism of the system by pointing out that it doesn't do a job well is countered by "that isn't what the system was designed for". I can't count the number of times that the failings of the OLPC as a 'learn to program' platform was countered with claims that it was never intended to be a tool to teach programming. In fact, the OLPC website never really said what they were really trying to accomplish. Just a bunch of marketing buzzwords.
This is only according to those stricken with Linus's so-called Microsoft-Hater Disease. It is my understanding that both of those companies *and* apple offered to hook them up with stuff and were declined. Why? Politics. It would be seen as selling out to the other backers--the free software crowd. That would make their Slashdot Karma go down. So rather than except the offer, he declined and when all the other players wisely decided to make their own products, rather than realizing his mistake he choose to shift blame and pin it on those "big evil corporations trying to screw the little guy".
By my recolection, they did say "how can we help" and were declined. The OLPC guys tryed to turn it into their own PR bonus.
In other words, OLPC was its own worst enemy. It had no clearly defined goal. Was its goal playing politics for Free Software? Was it playing high-stakes international politics with so-called developing nations? Was it a laptop company? Was it an education company? Who knows. They sure didn't.
If I was on that board, I would have tried my hardest to force them to pick one and go with that. Obviously they aren't a political football for Free Software, so they should go with whatever OS their customers want installed. Now the question is should they be a hardware manufacturer or an education provider? If they are hardware? Build their own rig from scratch and install Linux, OSX or Windows and let others do the software. If they are education? Outsource the engineering and work on sugar and good software. Doing all at once while wasting time worrying about their slashdot karma was what did them in.
Saying Microsoft and Intel is solely to blame is letting your disease take control. Not good.
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.
+1 on other remarks that it was not a technical issue
I'd say it was more than marketing, though. It was more along the lines of policy. I think they had an (barely) underlying agenda that this was not about the United States but about trying to bring the world on the same level technically.
I tried to talk with them about buying batches of computers for disadvantaged kids I work with in the US. These kids have no possibility of having their own computer, either. Some of them would also use it as a lighting device since they have no power at times to their house/apartment. But there was no interest on their part.
There are probably 1000s of organizations in the US that would buy 10 or 100 or 500 low-cost computers and would be willing to understand that there isn't much technical support from the seller at those low prices.
They made a really basic miscalculation about the potential audience for the machine.
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.
The OLPC is a perfect example of what happens when business challenged intellectuals try to do something. The OLPC was and still is so ahead of it's time and it could have been such a huge success had it's release to the world not been so mismanaged. Every techno-geek I know, including myself, would salivate everytime an article appeared regarding the OLPC. And my mouth still salivates when I read about the OLPC II with dual opposing touchscreens. Had they not made it so difficult to get one, with the limited time offer and the buy-one-get-one-free policy, This thing would have completely taken over the market instead of the eeepc. Then they would have had the funds and the market demand to make them for under $100. And they would have been able to head off the MS threat. So blame Negroponte. His heart was in the right place but he bumbled it with his economic stupidity and as a result lost the window of opportunity to get this remarkable product out into the world. I think there is still a chance with the OLPC II. How many of us here can honestly say we wouldn't pick one up if it were available? I would buy two!
given AMD did not support the project well enough to keep Geode up to date
No. This is correctly pronounced "AMD had no financial incentive to refresh Geode because nobody, including the OLPC project, was buying enough to make it worthwhile for a company that is absolutely hemorrhaging money."
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Is that deciding that it MUST be free software is the problem. There's a big difference between wanting things cheaply, which free software might be able to do for you, and insisting that it be all GPL'd. For a project like this, OSS zealotry had no place. The emphasis should have been on low cost. Whatever gets you what you need at the lowest price point is what you go with. That may well be OSS in a lot of cases but you use it because it does the job well for a good price, not because you are an ideologue.
So I agree with the GP, I felt the same way. When I heard that it was going to be all GPL I said "Well this is fucked." Reason is that means they weren't being pragmatic about it. They were putting ideologies on source code before the goal of getting computers to kids in poor countries. Also when you start making the GPL a focus, it bring out some of the worst zealots, you get people like RMS who want to tell you what it is going to be. That is NOT what your project needs.
What they needed to do was take any and everything that did what they wanted at the lowest cost. If that was MS or Apple provided, fine, if it was GPL, fine. They needed to say "Here's the requirements," and take what met them the best. If people or companies tried to play politics they needed to say "We aren't interested in that, you provide us with what we need or you don't, we aren't going to do something your way for political reasons." You take the real pragmatic approach of doing what you can to deliver a product that your customers want. This also means focusing on the needs of children, not the needs of geeks. Geeks may think a hackable kernel is a must, children in a 3rd world country probably just want something that is easy for them to get a book on.
That's why various netbooks are succeeding in first world countries. They are NOT concerned with ideology, they are concerned with making a product people want. What people want in 1st world nations is different, I'm not saying you could ship an EEE PC to Africa and have it succeed, but it is the design idea behind it. They give people what they want. They don't care what that is. You want Linux? Fine. You want Windows? Fine. You want a cheaper computer? Fine. You want a more capable computer? Fine. You get to have what you want. They aren't saying "No, this is the One True Way(tm) that netbooks must be done!" They figure out what the customers want and do their best to deliver that.
Had that been the focus of the OLPC project, it might have worked. Instead they played politics heavily, and not just in terms of OSS, and they came out with a POS that nobody was interested in.