6 ms·

Is „one laptop per child“ really as bad as the other vaporware/fraudware in the list?

karmakaze 5y ago
I'd feel bad having a $40 toy for a failed make-the-world-better $100 product. Wasn't there even a 2-for special where I buy one, and one gets sent abroad?
- mcphage 5y ago
  Yep, I did that, and got one for myself.
  - karmakaze 5y ago
    That's cool, better than the toy version as cute as it is. (For a sec, I thought you might have meant feel guilty and get a toy :-)
Robotbeat 5y ago
Yeah… that one kinda makes me sad. I agree it’s different from the others.
nullspace 5y ago
It looks like they are still around though, and at least seem to be active. The specific laptop itself, probably not, olpc does not seem to fit this list. I agree.
edly 5y ago
I knew a girl in school who had one of these. It was a neat little gadget at a cheap cost, but was criticized for not solving more pressing issues (water, schools) and there was no training provided for teachers. The laptops also weren't sustainable and difficult to repair. It seems the initiative is still kicking since their website is still alive (albeit without an HTTPS certificate).
- philjackson 5y ago
  > but was criticized for not solving more pressing issues Sounds very much like a fallacy of relative privation to me.
md_ 5y ago
Well, if you think OLPC was a deliberate grift—I don't—then it's like the moral difference between scamming buyers looking for an Internet-connected juicer and scamming donors looking to help the world. As a non-deliberate grift—I guess the same math applies? Wildly overpromising and underdelivering on a picnic cooler seems somehow less morally problematic than wildly overpromising and underdelivering on an effort to improve third-world childhood education. Of course, the counterpoint is that Silicon Valley (or MIT Media Lab) bros whose hearts are in the right place deserve plaudits for their ill-informed-but-generally-well-meaning efforts, even if those efforts waste millions of dollars that could have gone to more effective altruistic endeavors. Which, like, yeah, that's an argument, I guess?
- avs733 5y ago
  I think you are on the right track here, and its important. In the context of work with developing nations, the defense of good intentions is increasingly dismissed out of hand. Good intentions are often deeply problematic and can cause more harm than good - including capture/transfer of resources that could have been used in some other way improve conditions for people. c.f., many NGO projects to improve stove design in less developed countries [0] [0] https://nature.berkeley.edu/er100/readings/Crewe_1997.pdf https://nature.berkeley.edu/er100/readings/Crewe_1997.pdf
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
schwartzworld 5y ago
It's not. Chromebooks just came along and made their goals obsolete.
- ghaff 5y ago
  At least with respect to the developing world educational tool for children goal, it was probably filled by smartphones far more than Chromebooks.
kmeisthax 5y ago
Not necessarily. The list is actually two different categories mixed together: 1. Products which failed because they were targeting their niche poorly (e.g. Juicero, OLPC) 2. Products which failed because they were outright scams (e.g. Theranos, Coolest) However, I do think the failure of OLPC is still interesting enough to deserve a mention on this list. With OLPC in particular they were trying to be like three different things all at once and they succeeded at none of them. - OLPC wanted to sell computers to the educational market, so they were selling lots of cheap machines to schools. This is actually not a bad business model; Google and Apple today have basically cornered that market with Chromebooks and iPads. Had OLPC succeeded, we could have had schools covered in cheap XO-1s instead. However... - OLPC wanted to be a philanthropic mission to the third world, so they were designing the laptop with all sorts of weird features that only made sense for that market. Some of them are reasonable, like they actually intended it to be ruggedized and easy to repair. But they also had some weird features - like, it was designed around being able to mesh-network an entire village together with them. And at one point they were even going to have a handcrank on the thing so you could charge the laptop by hand if necessary. All of these features are unnecessary if you're just selling laptops to schools and they ultimately wound up getting dropped. - OLPC also was built around it's founder's pet theories about constructionist learning. If you don't know what that means, well, then you're probably not a Hacker News user; because constructonism is how most techies learn a new system. We play around with it. The laptop was designed around a Linux-based UI called Sugar and was specifically intended to push Free Software onto the third world. The idea was that kids could learn how the computer actually worked by modifying the software onboard. It even had a view source button on the keyboard! All of that is catnip to people like us and completely useless for educators. Ultimately they wound up delivering a very weird product that didn't actually do the thing it promised to do. That's very much in the spirit of a failed startup.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I'd add the technology probably also just wasn't there for the price point they wanted to build to. After all, a succession of netbook and adjacent laptops over the next few years didn't really hit a sweet spot either--certainly not commensurate with the hype in certain circles.
- 5y ago
londons_explore 5y ago
I contributed to the OLPC project. They had a lot of cool tech, but all the poor integration of a bunch of unrelated open source projects and a lack of people with the ability to design something to fit their market. The end result was a cool product that nobody wanted that didn't work awfully well. I now use my OLPC as a sunlight visible status board - and I still need to reboot it once a month because the kernel has some memory leak somewhere.

I'd feel bad having a $40 toy for a failed make-the-world-better $100 product. Wasn't there even a 2-for special where I buy one, and one gets sent abroad?

mcphage 5y ago
Yep, I did that, and got one for myself.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  That's cool, better than the toy version as cute as it is. (For a sec, I thought you might have meant feel guilty and get a toy :-)

Robotbeat 5y ago

Yeah… that one kinda makes me sad. I agree it’s different from the others.

nullspace 5y ago

It looks like they are still around though, and at least seem to be active. The specific laptop itself, probably not, olpc does not seem to fit this list. I agree.

edly 5y ago

I knew a girl in school who had one of these. It was a neat little gadget at a cheap cost, but was criticized for not solving more pressing issues (water, schools) and there was no training provided for teachers. The laptops also weren't sustainable and difficult to repair. It seems the initiative is still kicking since their website is still alive (albeit without an HTTPS certificate).

philjackson 5y ago
> but was criticized for not solving more pressing issues Sounds very much like a fallacy of relative privation to me.

md_ 5y ago

Well, if you think OLPC was a deliberate grift—I don't—then it's like the moral difference between scamming buyers looking for an Internet-connected juicer and scamming donors looking to help the world. As a non-deliberate grift—I guess the same math applies? Wildly overpromising and underdelivering on a picnic cooler seems somehow less morally problematic than wildly overpromising and underdelivering on an effort to improve third-world childhood education. Of course, the counterpoint is that Silicon Valley (or MIT Media Lab) bros whose hearts are in the right place deserve plaudits for their ill-informed-but-generally-well-meaning efforts, even if those efforts waste millions of dollars that could have gone to more effective altruistic endeavors. Which, like, yeah, that's an argument, I guess?

avs733 5y ago
I think you are on the right track here, and its important. In the context of work with developing nations, the defense of good intentions is increasingly dismissed out of hand. Good intentions are often deeply problematic and can cause more harm than good - including capture/transfer of resources that could have been used in some other way improve conditions for people. c.f., many NGO projects to improve stove design in less developed countries [0] [0] https://nature.berkeley.edu/er100/readings/Crewe_1997.pdf https://nature.berkeley.edu/er100/readings/Crewe_1997.pdf
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

schwartzworld 5y ago

It's not. Chromebooks just came along and made their goals obsolete.

ghaff 5y ago
At least with respect to the developing world educational tool for children goal, it was probably filled by smartphones far more than Chromebooks.

kmeisthax 5y ago

Not necessarily. The list is actually two different categories mixed together: 1. Products which failed because they were targeting their niche poorly (e.g. Juicero, OLPC) 2. Products which failed because they were outright scams (e.g. Theranos, Coolest) However, I do think the failure of OLPC is still interesting enough to deserve a mention on this list. With OLPC in particular they were trying to be like three different things all at once and they succeeded at none of them. - OLPC wanted to sell computers to the educational market, so they were selling lots of cheap machines to schools. This is actually not a bad business model; Google and Apple today have basically cornered that market with Chromebooks and iPads. Had OLPC succeeded, we could have had schools covered in cheap XO-1s instead. However... - OLPC wanted to be a philanthropic mission to the third world, so they were designing the laptop with all sorts of weird features that only made sense for that market. Some of them are reasonable, like they actually intended it to be ruggedized and easy to repair. But they also had some weird features - like, it was designed around being able to mesh-network an entire village together with them. And at one point they were even going to have a handcrank on the thing so you could charge the laptop by hand if necessary. All of these features are unnecessary if you're just selling laptops to schools and they ultimately wound up getting dropped. - OLPC also was built around it's founder's pet theories about constructionist learning. If you don't know what that means, well, then you're probably not a Hacker News user; because constructonism is how most techies learn a new system. We play around with it. The laptop was designed around a Linux-based UI called Sugar and was specifically intended to push Free Software onto the third world. The idea was that kids could learn how the computer actually worked by modifying the software onboard. It even had a view source button on the keyboard! All of that is catnip to people like us and completely useless for educators. Ultimately they wound up delivering a very weird product that didn't actually do the thing it promised to do. That's very much in the spirit of a failed startup.

ghaff 5y ago
I'd add the technology probably also just wasn't there for the price point they wanted to build to. After all, a succession of netbook and adjacent laptops over the next few years didn't really hit a sweet spot either--certainly not commensurate with the hype in certain circles.
5y ago

londons_explore 5y ago

I contributed to the OLPC project. They had a lot of cool tech, but all the poor integration of a bunch of unrelated open source projects and a lack of people with the ability to design something to fit their market. The end result was a cool product that nobody wanted that didn't work awfully well. I now use my OLPC as a sunlight visible status board - and I still need to reboot it once a month because the kernel has some memory leak somewhere.