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Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup? It was always a nonprofit, so of course it didn't make money. While the technology was lacking in many respec

Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup? It was always a nonprofit, so of course it didn't make money. While the technology was lacking in many respects, it did serve a lot of children at the time, and proved the market that Chromebooks came to later dominate with a similar approach (linux-based OS with minimal resources at $100-300 price point).

ghaff 5y ago
>Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup? I'd say it kind of did (as did Netbooks as a technology for the most part as well). It's smartphones really that won the segment that OLPC was primarily targeted at. Chromebooks became fairly big in education but primarily AFAIK in developed countries.
- tinco 5y ago
  If it, and netbooks as a hardware category, failed, it was because in the end they turned out to not have been worth it. I used a netbook happily for about a year or two, it cost ~$400 if I recall correctly, and afterwards I donated it to my sister who I think used it for a while as well. That's at least $150/yr for a low end product fun but uncomfortable product. After the netbook I upgraded to a Macbook Pro that was $1250, and I used it for 8 years, after which I also donated it to my sister, and she's still happily using it. That's a roughly similar $150/yr, but for a best in class product with great comfort and wide usability. I wonder if anyone used a OLPC's for more than a year or two.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    Didn't netbooks as a category just merge into cheaper laptops? I doubt they were unprofitable for the manufacturers. I'll bet the children in Africa etc with the OLPCs used them for several years. They can't switch to a MacBook.
    - chirau 5y ago
      They didn't really do much in Africa eventually, if anything at all.
  - McMiniBurger 5y ago
    but not anyone's OK with spending $1250 upfront if you earn $250 a month in a developing country, $1250 is like 9-month pay (* calculation may be wrong --- gotta sleep?)
    - tinco 5y ago
      Sure, but it is just an extreme example of the TCO of the OLPC being comparable to a high end professional grade laptop. It was just a very hard problem to solve, and the technology was not quite there yet. Definitely not suggesting kids in Africa should just buy macbook pro's, but $100 is also a lot of upfront cost for a product that's actually not that useful and destined for the wastebin within a year or two. I do hope I'm wrong and it brought some cool technology too some kids far removed from the big cities.
  - ohazi 5y ago
    For "cheap," netbooks as a category have been replaced by your run-of-the-mill entry-level laptop. The cheapest Dell Inspiron starts at ~$300. $400 gets you an Intel i3 or an AMD Ryzen 3, both of which are leagues better than an Atom. For "small," the category was replaced by Ultrabooks as people realized that it's usually better to have a thin laptop that doesn't force you to compromise on the display or keyboard size. I remember traveling with a netbook so that I'd have a computer I could use for tickets and reservations, and even for that, the low resolution 8-10" netbook screens were painful. 12-14" Ultrabooks with >= 1080p panels are much more comfortable, and the weight is comparable.
    - techrat 5y ago
      To be fair, you're comparing netbooks then what what we have now. At the time, the pokey, sluggish Atom was the best you could get for a lightweight system and longer-than-usual battery. Remember... the common alternative to a netbook then were awkward 1-2 inches thick 'desktop replacement' style monstrosities unless you wanted to pay a LOT of money relative to performance... and netbooks were $300ish versus $1200+ for laptops at the time. I was grateful for my netbook and they really did seem to push portables into becoming better at being... well, portable.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        To be fair there were fairly compact/light* laptops at the time from a variety of manufacturers. But the period between, say, 2000 and maybe the late 2000s in particular laptops were becoming common but you had to make serious tradeoffs between price, size/weight, performance, and other features. * By the standards of the time
    - thrower123 5y ago
      The Asus eeePCs were great for the time as a beat-around little on-the-go laptop, when most laptops were still 15 or 17 inches and weighed 5-10 pounds. I really enjoyed the one I bought in college - it actually fit on those terrible fold-out desks that lecture hall seats have.
    - ghaff 5y ago
  - Nursie 5y ago
    I wouldn’t have wanted to take a MacBook round outback Australia for months. A netbook, feh, doesn’t matter if it breaks.
    - tinco 5y ago
      I think you underestimate the build quality of the Macbook Pro, it is quite literally the best laptop ever created, if they produced them now with modern chips and monitors, developers would buy them by the thousands and possibly macos would still be the developers os of choice. I wouldn't hesitate to bring it to the outback. What do you think would happen to a macbook in Australia?
      - ghaff 5y ago
        I assume he's saying that if he needs a minimal laptop, he'd bring something pretty cheap and disposable--as I've done on trips. I've certainly brought a cheap Chromebook on some trips even if I use a MacBook at home.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "Netbooks as a technology for the most part" I know people that created books and websites on a netbook, who got though school and business meetings with them. I never seen that for a smartphone.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    People absolutely get through school and business meetings with smartphones. If you visit a community college or know someone who teaches at one, a surprisingly high percentage of students do their homework and write papers entirely on their phone. It's kind of amazing.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      ergonomically, that sounds like torture to me
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jasondigitized 5y ago
Agreed. This site is laden with cynicism.
gre 5y ago
The trackpad had terrible bugs that pinned the cursor to the side of the screen. That's as far as I got using it. I'm sad that some kid probably ended up with one on account of me.
Trufa 5y ago
Every child in the Uruguayan public system got his/her laptop, I don't know at a global scale but it gave access to the internet/technology to thousands of children that would otherwise wouldn't have. So calling it a total failure seems off to me.
- garmaine 5y ago
  By all accounts they were not really useful, broke easily, and couldn't be repaired in the field. Many countries backed out of their commitment once they tried out their samples. Those which took delivery ended up not integrating them into curriculum because they didn't deliver on their promise. It did kickstart the "netbook" form factor, which ended up replacing most OLPC use cases. So not a total failure from a technology standpoint, like Juicero and Theranos were. But it is a bit of a poster child for everything that's wrong with the MIT Media Lab. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop...
  - lupire 5y ago
    It didn't kickstart netbooks, which predate OLPC XO by a decade and were far less experimental designs.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      There were older subnotebooks of various kinds but "netbooks" by that name are usually associated with small Atom-based machines that Intel was pushing partly in response to OLPC hype. See, e.g., this article from 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20110130085835/http://blogs.computerworld.com/what_was_the_first_netbook https://web.archive.org/web/20110130085835/http://blogs.comp...
    - jefftk 5y ago
      Netbooks are usually considered to have started in 2007 with the OLPC and eeepc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook
potatolicious 5y ago
Arguably OLPC's approach has - in hindsight - been discredited, but yeah, it seems overly cruel to lump it in with Juicero or Theranos. We do have impossibly cheap computers now that are far more accessible, that do nearly all the things normally expected of computers, and with widely available resources for programming on them - RPi, Chromebooks, etc. The success of those devices relative to OLPC (with of course, the benefit of hindsight) seems to come down to a few major differences in the approach: - insistence on highly-custom everything, rather than exploiting as much as possible off-the-shelf to keep costs down. - insistence on targeting the absolute lowest-cost end of the market initially rather than starting at a higher price point and using that as a starting point for iterative cost-reduction. The latter pitfall one still sees various hardware startups fall into with some regularity. Universal accessibility is a fantastic goal, but often the easiest way to do it is to sell something considerably more expensive first.
blihp 5y ago
It did fall short of what they wanted to deliver as a device probably because it was far too ambitious... but they accomplished quite a bit due to that ambition. Consider that it was conceived of in a time before inexpensive laptops were available. In 2005, a low-end laptop still cost well over $1000. Things like a Chromebook, netbook, Raspberry Pi etc. didn't exist yet. If anything, the OLPC probably got companies thinking sooner and more seriously about the low cost portable computing space than they would have otherwise.
- dwheeler 5y ago
  I agree. OLPC wasn't a failure in the same sense as the others. They created laptops, they got used, and a lot of people did learn a lot. It didn't succeed to the level they hoped, but that's true for almost all projects. It's easier to be critical in retrospect. OLPC did succeed in making the world a better place, and that's to be commended.
fnord77 5y ago
One Thousand Laptops per Warlord
legitster 5y ago
Even 8+ years ago, OLPC was taught as a case study in business school. It was a largely failed project. It's a pretty classic example of a CEO who was very capable at establishing business partnerships but had such a rigid view about the problem they were trying to solve. They never really proved that the 1:1 concept actually had merit, but ended up being so invested in quantity over quality. In developing countries, the computers were too simple to teach effective computer skills. And in undeveloped countries, the laptops did nothing to address actual education problems. Chromebooks have the benefit years of Chrome apps being developed to solve actual problems. They also give up a lot of the goofy ideas like hand crank recharging or mesh networking and etc.
seumars 5y ago
Chromebooks simply took over the netbook market which was already established by the time OLPC got some publicity. I think OLPC failed because it became more about proving that tech and "bold ideas" from silicon valley could change the world, instead of seriously addressing issues in the third world – it reminds me of the PlayPump. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-what-went-wrong/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-wh...
- ghaff 5y ago
  OLPC wasn't "silicon valley." It came out of the MIT Media Lab.
agloeregrets 5y ago
Might I add...don't buy this. Why? Because you can literally buy an ACTUAL OLPC for $20 more.
cavalierfrix 5y ago
I was given an OLPC laptop as a gift, and learned that their CMOS battery (If I remember correctly) was hardwired, and when the battery died the laptop was useless. I sent my OLPC to someone on a forum who claimed to fix them, along with a fee, and never heard back. The only time I’ve been screwed by someone on a niche forum like that. Still, it was a fun thing to play with. The form factor was like a durable OG iBook, and it worked well for basic tasks.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
right, didn't really 'fail' as a 'startup' - it just took a very long time to develop and tech continued to move/struggles to be independent and stable with manufacturer messes and giant competing companies, various interests slowing things down all while user needs changed rapidly and capabilities of platforms increased. This was really a long time ago early 00s things were very different and nowhere near mobile device era and so at the time was very noble and promising. I didn't need to hear Justin Kan talking stupid claiming it missed the mark because of phones in that video about the toys ignoring the timeline/history, it was years before that which is a lot considering how fast things changed
Camillo 5y ago
OLPC straddles the line between startup and social program. Given that it wasn't actively harmful [citation needed], it actually managed to produce the laptops, and they had some non-zero if modest utility, we'd have to place it in the upper ranks of the latter category. Even if it had zero impact, that would merely place it in the modal group [0], nothing to be ashamed of! [0]: see the Iron Law of Evaluation.
duskwuff 5y ago
A key element of the project was their custom Sugar Linux desktop environment which would have wireless collaboration and data sharing as a central feature, and a suite of custom educational software to run in that environment. The OLPC Foundation never fully delivered on that promise -- the software they shipped was buggy and incomplete, with few applications available and many of the promised features stubbed out or completely absent. The only real saving grace was that their desktop environment included wrappers for Firefox and OpenOffice, and that was enough to make the systems useful to students. The OLPC Foundation went on to create a series of increasingly ridiculous design renders of future projects -- dual-screen laptops, tablets with solar cells on the back, ultra-thin tablets... none of these were manufactured. Most of them weren't even technologically feasible! The OLPC project did jump-start interest in ultralight laptops, though, and probably led to the development of early netbooks like the Eee PC. So there's that.
herbst 5y ago
I've had a 200$ eeepc long before that. Not sure if they actually changed the market in any way

ghaff 5y ago

>Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup? I'd say it kind of did (as did Netbooks as a technology for the most part as well). It's smartphones really that won the segment that OLPC was primarily targeted at. Chromebooks became fairly big in education but primarily AFAIK in developed countries.

tinco 5y ago
If it, and netbooks as a hardware category, failed, it was because in the end they turned out to not have been worth it. I used a netbook happily for about a year or two, it cost ~$400 if I recall correctly, and afterwards I donated it to my sister who I think used it for a while as well. That's at least $150/yr for a low end product fun but uncomfortable product. After the netbook I upgraded to a Macbook Pro that was $1250, and I used it for 8 years, after which I also donated it to my sister, and she's still happily using it. That's a roughly similar $150/yr, but for a best in class product with great comfort and wide usability. I wonder if anyone used a OLPC's for more than a year or two.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  Didn't netbooks as a category just merge into cheaper laptops? I doubt they were unprofitable for the manufacturers. I'll bet the children in Africa etc with the OLPCs used them for several years. They can't switch to a MacBook.
  - chirau 5y ago
    They didn't really do much in Africa eventually, if anything at all.
- McMiniBurger 5y ago
  but not anyone's OK with spending $1250 upfront if you earn $250 a month in a developing country, $1250 is like 9-month pay (* calculation may be wrong --- gotta sleep?)
  - tinco 5y ago
    Sure, but it is just an extreme example of the TCO of the OLPC being comparable to a high end professional grade laptop. It was just a very hard problem to solve, and the technology was not quite there yet. Definitely not suggesting kids in Africa should just buy macbook pro's, but $100 is also a lot of upfront cost for a product that's actually not that useful and destined for the wastebin within a year or two. I do hope I'm wrong and it brought some cool technology too some kids far removed from the big cities.
- ohazi 5y ago
  For "cheap," netbooks as a category have been replaced by your run-of-the-mill entry-level laptop. The cheapest Dell Inspiron starts at ~$300. $400 gets you an Intel i3 or an AMD Ryzen 3, both of which are leagues better than an Atom. For "small," the category was replaced by Ultrabooks as people realized that it's usually better to have a thin laptop that doesn't force you to compromise on the display or keyboard size. I remember traveling with a netbook so that I'd have a computer I could use for tickets and reservations, and even for that, the low resolution 8-10" netbook screens were painful. 12-14" Ultrabooks with >= 1080p panels are much more comfortable, and the weight is comparable.
  - techrat 5y ago
    To be fair, you're comparing netbooks then what what we have now. At the time, the pokey, sluggish Atom was the best you could get for a lightweight system and longer-than-usual battery. Remember... the common alternative to a netbook then were awkward 1-2 inches thick 'desktop replacement' style monstrosities unless you wanted to pay a LOT of money relative to performance... and netbooks were $300ish versus $1200+ for laptops at the time. I was grateful for my netbook and they really did seem to push portables into becoming better at being... well, portable.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      To be fair there were fairly compact/light* laptops at the time from a variety of manufacturers. But the period between, say, 2000 and maybe the late 2000s in particular laptops were becoming common but you had to make serious tradeoffs between price, size/weight, performance, and other features. * By the standards of the time
  - thrower123 5y ago
    The Asus eeePCs were great for the time as a beat-around little on-the-go laptop, when most laptops were still 15 or 17 inches and weighed 5-10 pounds. I really enjoyed the one I bought in college - it actually fit on those terrible fold-out desks that lecture hall seats have.
  - ghaff 5y ago
- Nursie 5y ago
  I wouldn’t have wanted to take a MacBook round outback Australia for months. A netbook, feh, doesn’t matter if it breaks.
  - tinco 5y ago
    I think you underestimate the build quality of the Macbook Pro, it is quite literally the best laptop ever created, if they produced them now with modern chips and monitors, developers would buy them by the thousands and possibly macos would still be the developers os of choice. I wouldn't hesitate to bring it to the outback. What do you think would happen to a macbook in Australia?
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I assume he's saying that if he needs a minimal laptop, he'd bring something pretty cheap and disposable--as I've done on trips. I've certainly brought a cheap Chromebook on some trips even if I use a MacBook at home.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"Netbooks as a technology for the most part" I know people that created books and websites on a netbook, who got though school and business meetings with them. I never seen that for a smartphone.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  People absolutely get through school and business meetings with smartphones. If you visit a community college or know someone who teaches at one, a surprisingly high percentage of students do their homework and write papers entirely on their phone. It's kind of amazing.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    ergonomically, that sounds like torture to me
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jasondigitized 5y ago

Agreed. This site is laden with cynicism.

gre 5y ago

The trackpad had terrible bugs that pinned the cursor to the side of the screen. That's as far as I got using it. I'm sad that some kid probably ended up with one on account of me.

Trufa 5y ago

Every child in the Uruguayan public system got his/her laptop, I don't know at a global scale but it gave access to the internet/technology to thousands of children that would otherwise wouldn't have. So calling it a total failure seems off to me.

garmaine 5y ago
By all accounts they were not really useful, broke easily, and couldn't be repaired in the field. Many countries backed out of their commitment once they tried out their samples. Those which took delivery ended up not integrating them into curriculum because they didn't deliver on their promise. It did kickstart the "netbook" form factor, which ended up replacing most OLPC use cases. So not a total failure from a technology standpoint, like Juicero and Theranos were. But it is a bit of a poster child for everything that's wrong with the MIT Media Lab. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop...
- lupire 5y ago
  It didn't kickstart netbooks, which predate OLPC XO by a decade and were far less experimental designs.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    There were older subnotebooks of various kinds but "netbooks" by that name are usually associated with small Atom-based machines that Intel was pushing partly in response to OLPC hype. See, e.g., this article from 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20110130085835/http://blogs.computerworld.com/what_was_the_first_netbook https://web.archive.org/web/20110130085835/http://blogs.comp...
  - jefftk 5y ago
    Netbooks are usually considered to have started in 2007 with the OLPC and eeepc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

potatolicious 5y ago

Arguably OLPC's approach has - in hindsight - been discredited, but yeah, it seems overly cruel to lump it in with Juicero or Theranos. We do have impossibly cheap computers now that are far more accessible, that do nearly all the things normally expected of computers, and with widely available resources for programming on them - RPi, Chromebooks, etc. The success of those devices relative to OLPC (with of course, the benefit of hindsight) seems to come down to a few major differences in the approach: - insistence on highly-custom everything, rather than exploiting as much as possible off-the-shelf to keep costs down. - insistence on targeting the absolute lowest-cost end of the market initially rather than starting at a higher price point and using that as a starting point for iterative cost-reduction. The latter pitfall one still sees various hardware startups fall into with some regularity. Universal accessibility is a fantastic goal, but often the easiest way to do it is to sell something considerably more expensive first.

blihp 5y ago

It did fall short of what they wanted to deliver as a device probably because it was far too ambitious... but they accomplished quite a bit due to that ambition. Consider that it was conceived of in a time before inexpensive laptops were available. In 2005, a low-end laptop still cost well over $1000. Things like a Chromebook, netbook, Raspberry Pi etc. didn't exist yet. If anything, the OLPC probably got companies thinking sooner and more seriously about the low cost portable computing space than they would have otherwise.

dwheeler 5y ago
I agree. OLPC wasn't a failure in the same sense as the others. They created laptops, they got used, and a lot of people did learn a lot. It didn't succeed to the level they hoped, but that's true for almost all projects. It's easier to be critical in retrospect. OLPC did succeed in making the world a better place, and that's to be commended.

fnord77 5y ago

One Thousand Laptops per Warlord

legitster 5y ago

Even 8+ years ago, OLPC was taught as a case study in business school. It was a largely failed project. It's a pretty classic example of a CEO who was very capable at establishing business partnerships but had such a rigid view about the problem they were trying to solve. They never really proved that the 1:1 concept actually had merit, but ended up being so invested in quantity over quality. In developing countries, the computers were too simple to teach effective computer skills. And in undeveloped countries, the laptops did nothing to address actual education problems. Chromebooks have the benefit years of Chrome apps being developed to solve actual problems. They also give up a lot of the goofy ideas like hand crank recharging or mesh networking and etc.

seumars 5y ago

Chromebooks simply took over the netbook market which was already established by the time OLPC got some publicity. I think OLPC failed because it became more about proving that tech and "bold ideas" from silicon valley could change the world, instead of seriously addressing issues in the third world – it reminds me of the PlayPump. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-what-went-wrong/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-wh...

ghaff 5y ago
OLPC wasn't "silicon valley." It came out of the MIT Media Lab.

agloeregrets 5y ago

Might I add...don't buy this. Why? Because you can literally buy an ACTUAL OLPC for $20 more.

cavalierfrix 5y ago

I was given an OLPC laptop as a gift, and learned that their CMOS battery (If I remember correctly) was hardwired, and when the battery died the laptop was useless. I sent my OLPC to someone on a forum who claimed to fix them, along with a fee, and never heard back. The only time I’ve been screwed by someone on a niche forum like that. Still, it was a fun thing to play with. The form factor was like a durable OG iBook, and it worked well for basic tasks.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

right, didn't really 'fail' as a 'startup' - it just took a very long time to develop and tech continued to move/struggles to be independent and stable with manufacturer messes and giant competing companies, various interests slowing things down all while user needs changed rapidly and capabilities of platforms increased. This was really a long time ago early 00s things were very different and nowhere near mobile device era and so at the time was very noble and promising. I didn't need to hear Justin Kan talking stupid claiming it missed the mark because of phones in that video about the toys ignoring the timeline/history, it was years before that which is a lot considering how fast things changed

Camillo 5y ago

OLPC straddles the line between startup and social program. Given that it wasn't actively harmful [citation needed], it actually managed to produce the laptops, and they had some non-zero if modest utility, we'd have to place it in the upper ranks of the latter category. Even if it had zero impact, that would merely place it in the modal group [0], nothing to be ashamed of! [0]: see the Iron Law of Evaluation.

duskwuff 5y ago

A key element of the project was their custom Sugar Linux desktop environment which would have wireless collaboration and data sharing as a central feature, and a suite of custom educational software to run in that environment. The OLPC Foundation never fully delivered on that promise -- the software they shipped was buggy and incomplete, with few applications available and many of the promised features stubbed out or completely absent. The only real saving grace was that their desktop environment included wrappers for Firefox and OpenOffice, and that was enough to make the systems useful to students. The OLPC Foundation went on to create a series of increasingly ridiculous design renders of future projects -- dual-screen laptops, tablets with solar cells on the back, ultra-thin tablets... none of these were manufactured. Most of them weren't even technologically feasible! The OLPC project did jump-start interest in ultralight laptops, though, and probably led to the development of early netbooks like the Eee PC. So there's that.

herbst 5y ago

I've had a 200$ eeepc long before that. Not sure if they actually changed the market in any way