Whatever happened to OLPC?
There’s a great article on the Times Online about the One Laptop per Child, or OLPC. 
This was a philanthropic initiative to get laptops into the hands of kids in developing countries. It’s been slow to deliver, and, according to this article, that’s because some large technology companies have done their best to kill it off. Apparently some large near-monopolies saw a cheap laptop for children as an attack on their market share.
Read the article for the details.
Well, we are “only” shipping 55K laptops per month, and only have 400K in the hands of kids. The article is fairly good I’d say — and early plans to go from 0 to millions of laptops per month in a blink were a bit wild.
It is complex enough to ship 55K a month and deal with the complexities of deploying in the 3rd world. Hard but a fantastic endeavour. I say we are winning, and the Wellington office opening is just cream on top :-)
Comment by martin langhoff — 12 August 2008 @ 11:37 am