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

Feature creep killed the XO

[QuantumG]

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.

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

Re:Feature creep killed the XO

[westlake]

If they'd just made the widget, put it into production, and focused on the sales, they would have made a difference.

They built the widget. They put it up for sale. Nothing much happened.

Confirmed sales to date about 1.4 million:

Uruguay 300,000
Peru 290,000
Columbia 165,000
Rwanda 100,000

Sales outside the Americas have been pathetic.

G1G1 167,000 [Distributed in seemingly random 3 to 20K clumps. I can't bring myself to take this part of the program seriously.]

Summary of laptop orders

The demand for Windows came from the third world education minister - the guy who is expected to sign the purchase order for 300,000 units.

Re:Feature creep killed the XO

[QuantumG]

time to market.. heard of it? They hyped up their product then dragged their feet, by the time it was ready, alternatives had been found. This is the reason why the stealth startup was invented.

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.

Re:Feature creep killed the XO

[mrcparker]

I think that I must be the only person who actually purchased an XO, because all of the reasons given for the poor sales are not pointing out the one problem that the OLPC XO had on launch: it was (and still is) sluggish. It is a pain in the ass to use, since doing things like reading PDFs is slow as hell.

My OLPC is sitting in my office unused because, as much as I wanted to use it to read PDFs and browse the web, Sugar is slow and doing things like moving from page-to-page in the reader take a looong time.

On the development side, did the Sugar APIs ever get mature enough that the documentation was stable? Is it really ready for third parties to write software in Sugar without having to worry that large sections of their code will have to change on the nest upgrade? Looking right now at the docs, there are still parts of the code that do not have stable APIs.

How can you take a sluggish device with moving APIs and expect to sell it to countries on a large scale? Will governments really be willing to spend millions of dollars on something that is clearly unfinished design-wise and second-rate?

Microsoft and Intel did not kill the OLPC. The OLPC was enough to kill itself.

Who are you? Who who? Who who?

[Ihmhi]

Who is Ivan Krstić? Is he related to Little Bobby Tables?

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.

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.

I'm not sure that's fair.

[EWAdams]

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.

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.

OLPC is a success

[Charbax]

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.

Re:OLPC is a success

[Charbax]

OLPC always said they'd reach the $100 price point by selling many millions of laptops. Initial goal was at least sell 6 million units to reach that price goal. Now, with "only" 1 million units sold, and an unsupported AMD Geode based hardware that uses non-optimized anymore components, you can't expect them to be able to lower the price.

Though OLPC is launching XO-1.5 based on the VIA processor in the next few weeks or months as you can see in the videos on my http://olpc.tv/ Using this new lower power VIA processor, OLPC can speed it up 4x as well and still lower the cost and lower the power consumption.

You complainers about Windows support need to learn that it's BECAUSE OLPC is an open platform that Microsoft is able to port Windows XP for it. You are completely ridiculous not understanding that for OLPC to not support Windows XP, they would have had to build a closed proprietary system. Since specs of XO are opened, and it's X86 based, Microsoft is obviously able to read the specs on the Wiki and build a port of Windows XP for it. It's just plain stupid to keep asking for OLPC to somehow block Microsoft.

Give 1 Get 1 program was not a failure at all. Tens of thousands of laptops were given for free in dozens of countries. To create those dozens of hundred or thousand-laptop OLPC pilot projects. Those projects would not have been financed if it wasn't for the G1G1 program.

Now sure, you can critisize OLPC for not having found more money if you want. I find it that considering they are just a 30-employee non-profit, finding $200 million to fund those 1 million first XO laptops is pretty decent achievement no matter what. Sure, I'd prefer if they had access to billions of dollars to help millions more children get laptops. People in rich countries are greedy, they only care to pay for stuff that they can get for themselves.

Please, whatever

[coryking]

I'm not a big fan of Negroponte, but both Intel and Microsoft went out of their way to kill this project

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".

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.

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.

Re:Please, whatever

[TheRaven64]

Politics. It would be seen as selling out to the other backers--the free software crowd

If you believe this, then you're missing the point of the OLPC project. Building the product was only originally intended to be a demonstration. The idea of having open designs was to encourage other groups to produce their own versions. If the Indian government, for example, had decided they wanted to build them using native production capacity then they could take the designs, take the software, modify either in any way they wanted, and start producing them. While having OS X on them might have been nice in the short term, it would have made this impossible.

Having Intel produce competing devices wasn't a problem, it was an original project aim (at least, according to the talk I saw from one of the project instigators a few years back). They wanted Intel to undercut them. They wanted Chinese companies to produce clones. And they wanted these clones to be as good as possible, copying as much of their code as possible, because the aim of the project was to get laptops to children, not to make a profit or ship a certain number of units.

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.

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.