Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Barnett argues that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 revealed the gap between an outdated Cold War-era military and a radically different one needed to deal with emerging threats. He analyzes recent military operations including Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom amongst other, and points out that the nature of war has changed, and so has the nature of the enemy. In this video, Thomas Barnett proposes a “Department Of Everything Else” – arguing that this will be a department between War (Defense) and Peace (State), one that is focused on getting countries from the Gap (as I describe those less connected regions) to the Core. State is built primarily to deal with functioning states, or the Core, while Defense is reorienting after 9/11 to wage wars in the Gap. 

Thomas Barnett has been described by U.S. News & World Report’s Michael Barone as “one of the most important strategic thinkers of our time.” He is a New York Times-bestselling author and a nationally-known public speaker who’s been profiled on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal many times. Amongst other notable achievements, Tom Barnette has served as a strategic planner who has worked in national security affairs since the end of the Cold War. He worked as a Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College, Newport RI, where he taught and served–in a senior advisory role–with military and civilian leaders in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, Central Command, Special Operations Command, and Joint Forces Command.  He has also been engaged in some strategic concepts that link change in the international security environment to the imperative of transforming U.S. military capabilities to meet future threats.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anyways, back to the OLPC topic – The original goal of the project was to reduce the cost to market to about $100 per unit. However, insufficient volume and configuration changes have ensured that dream remains elusive, and cost to market to about $188 per unit. What’s worse – a series of reorganizations in the recent few years have alienated several key contributors. OLPC Director of Security, Ivan Krstic, left the program earlier this year, complaining that, “the internal restructuring reflected a fundamental change of vision that he couldn’t accept”. Ivan continues to blast the program on his personal blog. Ranting of a not-so-happy-ex-employee? Not so fast. Ivan points to several key issues, including infrastructure. He wrote:

“We have no real support infrastructure for these rollouts, our development process is not allocating any time for dealing with critical deployment issues that (will inevitably) come up, and we have no process for managing the crises that will ensue”.

Another key excerpt from his personal blog:

“Put differently, OLPC can’t claim to be preoccupied with learning and not with training children to be office computer drones, while at the same time being coerced by hollow office drone rhetoric to deploy the computers with office drone software. Nicholas used to say the thought of the XOs being used to teach 6-year olds Word and Excel made him cringe. Apparently, no longer so. Which is it? The vacillation needs to stop. As they say in the motherland: shit or get off the pot.”

A “big enough” population out there thinks that Nicholas is insane, even adding that he is a “terrible manager and leader”. A case in point – on May 20, 2008, at the recent OLPC Country Workshop, Nicholas said that the OLPC mission statement “has not changed one ounce”.  And the very next minute, he introduced a fourth version of the mission statement, entirely different from the previous three reported on OLPC News not long ago. Hmmm… The original Five Core Principles were:
1. Child Ownership
2. Low Ages
3. Saturation
4. Connection
5. Free and Open Source
Then how does XO (the Microsoft Windows version) fit in this vision?

Bottom line – The OLPC project is now struggling to sustain momentum, and might end up on life support if its leadership can’t turn things around.

But hold on… this blog post isn’t all about bashing the OLPC program… it’s to celebrate the success, even if limited, of the program, including 600,000 units sold in the first six months, for more than $200 million. And how can you forget that this program helped create a new market segment, ultra-low-cost laptops, where there is more Linux than Windows on offer. So check out the video below – OLPC program distributes 650 laptops in a remote school on Cambodia… and the reaction from a grateful community. Do you find it interesting that in Cambodia, the Defense Minister if the “official cheerleader” for the program? Hmmm… wonder what happened to the Ministry of Education.

Also check out my previous post about Nicholas reporting on the OLPC program.

Click here to view the embedded video.