One Laptop Per Child – On Life Support?
Am sure you are already aware about Nicholas Negroponte’s “One Laptop Per Child” program, (also check out the cool “vision” video here)which over the last few years has gained considerable momentum and accolades… in addition to a healthy amount of criticism. Back in business school, many times I have scratched my head to the financial viability of a program like this… in addition to the long term sustainability. Sure there are some generous souls out there and would love to spend/donate/give-away… but even the noblest of all ideas need a “realistic” financial plan. Four decades of global charitable contributions have poured trillions/pentillions of dollars into Africa… and failed to produce any comparable returns – forget about long lasting effects. The continent if at all, is in even more dire need of resources and funds. How many case studies do we need before we learn our lesson?
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.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3364742746081625799
Tags: Business School, Charitable Contributions, Configuration Changes, Crises, Critical Deployment, Deployment Issues, Dire Need, Excerpt From, Featured, Financial Viability, Fundamental Change, Generous Souls, Innovation, Insufficient Volume, Ivan Points, Krstic, Leadership, Nicholas Negroponte, Realistic Financial Plan, Reorganizations, Support Infrastructure, Talent, Technology, Term Sustainability, TrillionsIf you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
