OLPC - Overview

Michael Gartenberg | April 27, 2007, 09:39 AM

As mentioned, I was invited yesterday along with a group of reporters and a few other analysts to meet with the OLPC team in their offices in Cambridge. The meeting lasted about three hours and started with an introduction from Nicholas Negroponte (the former head of MIT’s Media Lab), presentations from the OLPC team about the hardware and the software and finally some discussion from some of the OLPC partners who included AMD and Red Hat. Being that this is Cambridge only a stone’s throw from MIT, the offices were of course wired and I was tempted to blog the event live. I didn’t, mostly to allow a little reflective thought and to allow the "vendor glow" to fade just a bit. I'll break this up into several posts and start with the other stories I saw about the event.

There are a few other reports of the meeting from the AP and Reuters Engadget points to them here and here. Both of the articles play up different points of the meeting and in some ways leave out what I think were important things that were said or simply played up the wrong angles. The AP story plays up the fact that the XO (as the OLPC is called) can run Windows and that XO engineers were working with Microsoft. That's not quite what Negroponte said. My notes have it that machines were sent to Microsoft and they have some version of Windows running on it. Negroponte was unable to say what version of Windows it was, mentioned that to run Windows would require the use of the SD card reader and it was clear to me that Negroponte had as much interest in Windows on this machine as Steve Ballmer has to in Linux apps working on Vista. Negroponte did say he did believe that the $3.00 version of Windows Microsoft was offering was a "unequivocally" a direct result of the OLPC project. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft ends up co-opting this project.

The Reuters articles talks about OLPCs in use in US schools. What the article doesn't mention is that Negroponte first said the OLPC was not for the US but he was going from a "no" in that regard to a "maybe". That is, until a reporter from the Wall Street Journal reminded him that then Governor Mitt Romney had announced that Massachusetts was going to purchase OLPCs and he said that he had actually gone from a Yes to a No and now back to a Maybe and then elabroated from there and mentioned that 19 governors were interested in OLPCs. The article also did not mention Negroponte's comment that for the OLPC to be sold in the US it would have to be to subsidize other students getting the machines in other countries, so no $175 computers here. The anecdote in the AP story about Jeb Bush and his older brother John is as it appears in my notes. So bottom line, don't expect OLPCs here in the US running Windows anytime soon.