OLPC - The Vision

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

As I mentioned in the prior post, the day started with a presentation from Nicholas Negroponte (who I did not know what John Negroponte's younger brother). This is important because if you never had heard him speak directly, you need to understand that Negroponte is super smart, articulate, persuasive, offers a genuine vision. He's perfectly groomed in an expensive suit, perfectly knotted rep tie (no black turtlenecks here). If he wanted to, he could easily argue that the world is flat and most folks in the room would have a hard time proving he was wrong. As a speaker, he's like an anti-Steve Jobs but no less effective as a presenter. He came well prepared to speak about the vision of the OLPC and made a strong argument.

He first spoke of the ethos of the project, going back to 1968 and Seymour Papert's groundbreaking work in education and how children "learn learning" when they're involved with computer programming and the process of de-bugging was a way to "think about thinking". He spoke of the first computers in primary schools going back to 1982 and how during the 90s the Media Lab worked to create tele-comm to remote places to allow for access and in the late 90s, he donated a school in Cambodia, where the average income is $47 a year. (interesting anecdote, the families in Cambodia loved when the kids brought the laptops home as the laptop was brightest light source in the house.)

Does the work of this project scale was the question. Negroponte said scale wasn't about tele-comm. The bigger issue was the laptop. It was not "elastic", each child needed one, costs associated were too high. His argument was features are added to the base to justify keeping costs at a higher level, even when the base will do. Laptops lead to bloat and are less reliable and slower each year (Negroponte said he uses a Windows machine) This would require a new type of laptop and that led to the OLPC project.

He next talked about the economics of the project. First, the OLPC Org is a non-profit. Quanta is building the machines and gets their cost plus 3% per unit. OLPC gets $1 per unit. Cost of assembly is under $10. Quanta profit is about $3 per laptop. Cost is $175 for manufacturing. Price and cost are the same. There's no money for sales, marketing, distribution and profit (Negropnote claims 50% of a regular laptop goes for those costs).

Timing was now critical (and perhaps explains why he convened the meeting). In order to launch they need to get commitments for 3m units to trigger the supply chain. Within the next 30-100 days to get countries to commit. 100 days is to accommodate countries that need to tender a bid by law. Sept 20th is current launch date going to 400,000 per month right away.

Finally, Negroponte got to what for me was the core question and it remains the area where I am most sceptical. In places where the per capita family income is $47 a year. Where computers need alternative ways of power as there is no electricity, is it important to give these kids laptops as a priority? Not surprisingly, Negroponte had an answer to that question. "Substitute the word education for laptop", he said and "you'll never ask that question again." A great answer. One that makes sense on the surface. After all, of course you need medicine and food and clean water but in the end, education also helps to solve all those problems. Except, as someone with a background in education, I disagree with what he considers education. For him, OLPC is all about creating passion for learning, but he could not explain how the learning will be done. Yes, students have the potential to both teach and learn but some things just have to be learned. I asked if there was going to be a curriculum offered with the OLPC and I was told no. That's a teacher centric view of the universe. That's Intel (who calls their education device a class-mate). Negroponte said education wasn't about school or teaching and that's where I think there's a problem. I don't understand how giving two laptops to two illiterate children will allow them to teach each other to read (one of the core features of the XO machine is e-Book functionality) much less teach them how to program and de-bug computers. My other issue is more pragmatic. If I earned $47 dollars a year, had no belief that education was important to my existence and you gave me a computer valued at $175 dollars, the first thing I'm going to do is sell it because it's more valuable to me in other ways. (Negroponte did mention security such as need to authenticate in order to activate the machine or the ability to de-activate a machine if reported stolen but both of those things require the country purchasing to implement and also the machine to *be* reported stolen.)

Bottom Line? It's a noble idea. There's a lot of smart folks involved here and to dismiss their ideas would require far more arrogance than even I'm capable of mustering. Yet, I still don't think this is as good a thing as others believe. I think there are more important goals that need to be delivered first, (if you're laptop needs alternate power, perhaps we should still focus on getting electricity there first) and I question the type of education being delivered and how useful it will be. Time will tell but I fear that there's a lot of resources being allocated here and if this doesn't work, that money is going to be hard to replace for most of the countries where this is going to be deployed.