More troubles for OLPC

One of our friends in the computer geek community in Brighton has bought an OLPC, actually bought two. OLPC had a Christmas special on called Give One Get One, where one could buy an OLPC for oneself and buy a second one to be donated to a child. We are all waiting with baited breath for a glimpse of this hyped bit of technology to see what it can do. (He has got it in the meantime and check out his post.)

Some people who have lived in Outer Mongolia for the last three years might not have heard of an OLPC. Just joking. Just in case you haven’t heard, briefly it is the non-profit organisation founded by Nichoals Negroponte which has its worthy but slightly lofty objective to supply every child in the world with a laptop. Of course he means every child who doesn’t have family to buy one for her.

Since 2005, although the idea itself started much earlier, this organisation has been working on building a $100 laptop to be distributed to children in developing countries. This has had to be revised to $200 per laptop. Regrettably the cost of manufacture has overstepped its initial target by 100% which surely has knocked the original calculations somewhat.

To add to this set back, the target had been to manufacture a million units a month to further keep costs down. However, developing countries have been sluggish to buy into the concept and orders are not forthcoming to hit the target of twelve million units per year.

Recently OLPC has been experiencing further problems. First the CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen, quit in December 2007 to pursue some commercial projects. Then at the beginning of January 2008, Intel announced it was leaving the OLPC board. It seems the reason for this move is the fact that Intel was also involved in another cheap computer project which OLPC had viewed as competition to its own efforts.

So several paragraphs of dry information, and you might be wondering what the point could be, besides giving OLPC a bit of a punt. Good point. And it is a bit of a farfetched bit of thinking that got me musing about OLPC and Intel and the world in general. That far?

It’s the reason that was given for Intel moving on that caught my attention. It seems that Intel has been supporting other low cost laptop solutions and in the process has been competing for market share in some of the developing countries. With other words, Intel was exploring and exploiting markets that shouldt have been served by OLPC.

OLPC responded to the Intel move by stating that it felt no loss at Intel leaving because the company had contributed little to the project. Of course it could be argued that purely by virtue of having Intel represented on the board would lend OLPC credibility within the IT community as well as the world in general.

If one explores the topic further it is apparent that the dispute between Intel and OLPC has been ongoing. In fact it seems there was really only during a six month period in 2007 that Intel joined the OLPC board.

The argument evolves around whether humanitarian objectives can be married with business objectives. Intel, it seems, needs to ensure that its chips are in every computer in order to stay in business. Whereas OLPC says, let’s ensure that kids get a computer. So let’s all work on this together and please do not compete against OLPC for that segment of market share that we, at OLPC are targeting.

Is this indicative of how big business thinks? Are big public companies forced to be constantly aware of the bottom line? In fact one could almost say that public companies and non-profits would be unable to work together on a project such as this. At some stage the objectives followed by each entity would clash.

A further interesting point is that there has been some adverse commentary delivered by industry players such as Dell about the OLPC. CEO Michael Dell criticised its lack of computing power. Could this be a case of the industry getting nervous and seeing a competing product finding its way onto the market.

Some industry analysts maintain that the OLPC is powerful and has some innovative features. Some of which are a monitor that is not affected by sunlight, has good computing powers, runs on open source software and has wireless mesh capabilities.

Whatever the problems that OLPC has faced recently or will head towards in the future, lets hope that same do not hinder the organisation from its objective of ensuring that every child gets to have a computer. Providing technology to developing countries and especially its young will surely help to eradicate poverty. Watch the TED talk by OLPC’s Nicholas
Negroponte to get inspired.