9 ms·

I was peripherally involved with this project when it was new, and my biggest takeaways would be that: The project placed excessive emphasis on nonessential hi

I was peripherally involved with this project when it was new, and my biggest takeaways would be that: The project placed excessive emphasis on nonessential high-effort software initiatives, like developing their own BIOS replacement, desktop interface, UI framework, and nonstandard file manager. Developing and supporting this software consumed a lot of time at the Foundation. Additionally, the project placed a lot of emphasis on unusual, experimental hardware features which they were unable to fully utilize, such as the infamous hand crank (never fully shipped), an unusual hybrid capacitive/resistive touchpad (resistive features were never used), the Pixel Qi display (monochrome mode was poorly utilized by software), mesh networking (software was never fully implemented), hardware buttons for software features that were never implemented (particularly "view source")... the end result was that a lot of time and effort went into designing/redesigning unique features which didn't provide a lot of value to end users. However, the project placed very little emphasis on the development of boring-but-practical end-user software for the device, like educational games and tools, media viewing tools (like book readers and audio/movie players), or course management software. While they did thankfully ship an office productivity suite, it was literally just OpenOffice; it looked completely different from the rest of the OS, and was poorly integrated. The same was true of the web browser, which was a thin shell around Firefox. Given that these were probably the two most useful apps on the system, the system felt pretty disjointed overall. Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects, rather than as a means to a specific educational/humanitarian goal. This severely compromised the effectiveness of the project.

zozbot234 5y ago
> However, the project placed very little emphasis on the development of boring-but-practical end-user software for the device, like educational games and tools, book reading tools, or course management software. OTOH, I recall that media interest in the OLPC project helped pave the way for the earliest "netbook" class devices, which could readily accommodate these features, and in turn found plenty of use as educational tools in middle-income countries. (Though not in the poorest countries nor in the earliest grades of primary education; in either case, this would have called for rugged subnotebooks - much like the OLPC itself or, more to the point, the Toughbook series which was very costly on the market.)
- mjevans 5y ago
  The need for '3-4 year old proof' devices is still acutely felt in the first world, where many of the solutions just involve adding a larger back and sides shell and hoping nothing major happens to the screen. It really doesn't help that touchpads generally have oversimplified interfaces and poor support for any sort of peripheral that would aid in greater input speed or acuity. (Bluetooth doesn't count, I hate current wireless so much.)
  - elmomle 5y ago
    Why do 3-4 year olds need devices?
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      It's adults who need to keep their devices around where kids are.
    - halpert 5y ago
      They don’t need devices. Parents choose to give them devices because hanging out with kids can be tedious.
      - pugworthy 5y ago
        > hanging out with kids can be tedious. Just wow. Sorry for your kids if you have any, or sorry for your childhood if this is what you were taught. Sorry to be judgemental, but in 30+ years of raising kids, never did the word "tedious" come to mind.
        halpert 5y ago
        I have a young child. I love hanging out with her, but it’s very repetitive. She’s literally entertained by me holding a rubber giraffe in front of her for hours on end. I don’t blame people for getting bored after days / months. But sure, pass judgement all you want. I really don’t care.
ryukafalz 5y ago
> hardware buttons for software features that were never implemented (particularly "view source") Wasn't this implemented? I don't have my XO-1 in front of me now but I definitely recall being able to do that.
justicezyx 5y ago
You know, they were funded because of these novelty. If you spend more time with international charity activity, you'll see that no one truly want to help the poor, they are more interested in showing their kindness.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  I think it’s a bit more complicated than that — wasn’t Negroponte involved with it?
  - bmitc 5y ago
    And? https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/09/05/133159/mit-media-lab-jeffrey-epstein-joi-ito-nicholas-negroponte-funding-sex-abuse/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/09/05/133159/mit-media...
- lmm 5y ago
  I don't think it's quite that. I think it's that the prospect of making reducing poverty your life's work and the end result is that you reduce the world poverty rate by 0.02% is just too oppressive to face head-on. So you either get people who devote themselves to the process rather than the outcome, or you get outcome-oriented people who look for shortcuts and miracle fixes. But that doesn't mean the motive is insincere.
melony 5y ago
There is nothing wrong with the product vision. Remove the part about the handcrank and monochrome screen, and you are basically describing a modern day Macbook. Unfortunately they did not have the budget of Apple to deliver such a device.
kumarsw 5y ago
I'd say this is a fair assessment of the project. It came off as overambitious with a number of high-risk project management decisions made at the expensive of a minimum-viable initial product. And this was just looking at it from an engineering point of view, ignoring whether it did actually provide value over other options for educational spending in developing countries. Funny enough it seems like the hype it generated was its main contribution, which led to the netbook product segment and ultimately Chromebooks. I'd say its spiritual descendent is the humble grades 7-12 school chromebook with much more conventional hardware and software choices. The killer app for school Chromebooks is the combination of Google Docs and whatever Google's classroom management software is, provided cheap to schools in a long-game move by Google to hook a future generation on their office suite. Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations. Most likely, Chromebooks are too dependent on the "cloud" to be useful in middle-income countries with comparatively flimsy Internet connectivity. A general-purpose x86 laptop will simply go a lot further there. (And if you put a lightweight OS on it, you will almost never be limited by performance for basic workloads, even on old hardware.)
  - killjoywashere 5y ago
    This. I'm in the military, so keenly interested in how much you can do without network. I have two XO-1 laptops and I was a Cr-48 test pilot (their label for their beta testers). I took the Cr-48 with me to Japan for Fukushima in 2011. ChromeOS was not all that useful. Why run ChromeOS when Xubuntu is available? Lubuntu? Pick your favorite lightweight Linux distro. After about a week I cried uncle and installed Xubuntu. Depending on network for the ability to type a document is non-sensical. If I recall, Google Docs didn't have offline mode yet, but due to that experience I have keenly attended to offline mode. It improves things, but it's not a panacea. I don't think a laptop without network is ever going to be as awesome as one with network, but there's a lot of room on a laptop to do more than run AJAX applications in a browser (do they still talk about AJAX?) that offload all the smarts to a server-side app.
dleslie 5y ago
I have two; a friend of mine had one. We both threw Debian on them and relished in the glorious Pixel Qi display and the nigh-indestructible nature of them. Great for backpacking and road trips in dirty areas, at a then-unbeatable price.
- b112 5y ago
  These shipped? I've been looking for a laptop with eink for a decade, so I can use it in the sun. The new pine e-ink thing gives me hope, with a keyboard, but bah
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > The new pine e-ink thing gives me hope, with a keyboard, but bah Give it some time, they've just about gotten started on the low-level graphics support for that particular device. The next step is coming up with meaningful UX, probably no easy task given how different e-paper is from other sorts of visual output.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    Volunteers were able to acquire them early on, then they had the give-1-get-1 programme, and now many are just sitting on Ebay. I bought both of mine for around 200 CAD.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    It's not e-ink, it's a transflexive LCD where you can remove the colour and turn off the backlight to get higher res, as the subpixels are setup like a camera (square of RG/GB) instead of the normal 3 vertical subpixels (RGB)
rektide 5y ago
The disjointed efforts & lack of care for the most common use modes are jarring. The inability to get hardware promises really delivered sucked. There were some really good & powerful underlying OS concepts that I think we ought have deep reverence for. Even if the hardware-layer 802.11s wifi mesh didn't work, the systems-layer link-local XMPP mesh, used to create Telepathy Tubes, was ultra-advanced systems engineering that just worked, that was supremely well engineered by discerning sharp choices. There's so many examples of really smart really sharp visionary engineering. To tick off all the places a complete rebuild of the computing experience failed is cheap and easy. Of course there were a lot of pet project hanger-ons, a lot of non-core engineering. It's just a pity we live in such a scarce, chased society, where such a novel engineering project failed to garner the love & attention it deserved. If there's a reason OLPC failed, it's as much because the rest of the world failed to show up for some bold visionary open source engineering. And in my personal view, it's because open source was already chiefly a husk, a shell, for industrial software development. I don't think the world ever really engaged OLPC at the level it deserved, we all failed to explore a delivered viable greatness & make it our own (a difficulty amplified how long it took for Sugar builds to be available on other platforms). The positive powerful lessons XOPC had for us weren't understood or appreciated then, and we're still today hooked on sad story of failure. Rather than anyone bothering to understand the victory & success & power that was built. Out of best of breed open source systems[1]. Effectiveness could have been higher. But this project chose great tech, & it feels as much like an indicator of failure by the geeks who should have seen further. It's hard to form open source community, but there were so many good ideas here, and just a little more getting-the-ball rolling would have lead to a radically different song we sing about this. There was an incredibly interesting platform for software development in a class-room scale, extremely well envisioned, and we all failed to rise to the high standards of possibility this new, vanguard capability set out for. [1] https://www.aosabook.org/en/telepathy.html https://www.aosabook.org/en/telepathy.html
- mavhc 5y ago
  That's great, but using a load of poor countries to alpha test your new OS ideas seems a bit dodgy. Everyone should have realised inventing something brand new for every part of the stack would fail. We want new hardware, and firmware, and OS design, and GUI design, and apps? And make it all something no one is familiar with?
908B64B197 5y ago
> The project placed excessive emphasis on nonessential high-effort software initiatives, like developing their own BIOS replacement, desktop interface, UI framework, and nonstandard file manager. Developing and supporting this software consumed a lot of time at the Foundation How many of these were funded PhD thesis vs software from salaried devs?
- cjbprime 5y ago
  None were funded PhD theses -- a mix of salaried devs, donated engineering time from partners like Red Hat, work done by volunteers in purchasing countries like Uruguay, and general open source contributions. (I was a long-time salaried dev for OLPC.)
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Interesting. I assumed the research component was bigger since the project originated at MIT, and that it was one of the reasons they were pushing for a system that didn’t exist at the time instead of porting a known Linux distribution to it.
robinsoh 5y ago
> Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects I'm so glad to see others speaking out about this. I'm 100% in agreement that's what "saviour" projects like MIT Asia, OLPC have all ended up being. > the Pixel Qi display (monochrome mode was poorly utilized by software) I've said this before about the Pixel Qi panel in the XO-1. I'm not attempting to be negative, but I actually work in the display industry and found the PixelQi display on the OLPC-XO-1 to be unusable. My perception of the display was one with very low quality color with backlight; and terrible viewing angle and unreadable contrast levels in bright sunlight. It also had low resolution. The XO-1 display I had access to had lots of pixel defects. If I am not mistaken (as I do not know actual pricing that Quanta got for the PixelQi displays) they were more expensive than LCDs and required additional parts that made managing their supply chain overall difficult. Most experts in my industry that I talked to expressed the opinion that it was a reality-distortion field type charismatic executive (ML Jepsen) who managed to convince people at OLPC to try that idea. It was funded by UN and money from developing countries budgets who were excited by the promise of being able to educate their masses. Sadly it looks as if those countries and their budget expenditures were taken for a ride by Nicholas Negroponte and his gang, rather than benefiting from a genuinely merit based idea.
- cjbprime 5y ago
  > low resolution Do you mean color resolution? The screen pixel resolution was 1200x900, which was unusually high both for a 7.5" screen, and for a 2007 laptop.
  - robinsoh 5y ago
    > The screen pixel resolution was 1200x900, which was unusually high both for a 7.5" screen, and for a 2007 laptop. RGB XGA was dominant by 2006 so I don't think that's accurate.
    - cjbprime 5y ago
      Don't think which part is accurate? 1200x900 has 28% more pixels than XGA, right? (And that XGA was often on a 14" screen instead of a 7.5" screen.)
achow 5y ago
At that time (~2003) I didn't realize the benefit - India govt asked MIT Media lab to leave India due to their high salaries and I guess lack of accountability.. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/business/technology-rift-in-india-leads-mit-to-abandon-a-media-lab.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/business/technology-rift-...
clomond 5y ago
If I may riff and provide a potential view of a tangential alternative force that was at play that made the project destined to be doomed (via this approach you mention about un-implemented features across lower cost legacy hardware) The declining costs of the hardware (screens, capacitive touch, battery, processor, memory, etc etc) via a Wright's Law/ Moore's Law type curve meant that over-optimizing around lowering the costs by choosing 'imperfect' hardware meant it was very difficult to ever get this going as a viable platform - which if we imagine a world of these costs declining 1/4 the rate (4x slower), this ecosystem would have more likely found enough backers and funding to get some more roots and sprouts going. Ultimately, the cost curve declines of the other equipment meant that smartphones/Netbooks/tablets were bound to leapfrog it well before this OLPC 'formulation' was able to take off and be sustainable on its own.
mncharity 5y ago
I (also peripherally involved) suggest OPLC had a unicorn-or-dead business plan, but stalled unexpectedly long in not-quite-dead but not-unicorn-yet, and didn't adapt well. Intel and Microsoft/Gates put a lot of effort towards dead. A unicorn story of "succeed (massive country-wide deployments), and they will come (developers, content creators, educators, etc; also network and power infrastructure, next-gen laptops, maintenance and deployment infrastructure, supply chains, etc)" means you're doing a minimum viable unicorn launch. So for illustration, when you're bouncing along, running out of runway, and Guido (python BDFL) publishes clueless criticisms, and the python open-source community isn't "showing up" to help, do you spend scarce funds on hiring a community outreach person to nudge that, or focus on making your next bounce just that little bit higher enough to ignite your unicorn rocket engine, and make training wheels and bootstrap wings a non-issue? Especially when a critical bottleneck isn't technical, but Bill flying around offering politicians Microsoft and Gates Foundation bounties on unicorn eggs. So I suggest the goal was to trigger mass deployments, supporting subsequent refinement. I'm unclear on what/which technical improvements might have been sufficient to alter the deployment outcome. But people have been critiquing the unicorn-pathfinder-prototype-alpha-preview-0.0.3 unicorn corpse ever since. :)
musicale 5y ago
> Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects, rather than as a means to a specific educational/humanitarian goal. This severely compromised the effectiveness of the project. Be that as it may: 1. The research projects were kind of cool. 2. I suspect that OLPC paved the way for the netbook/chromebook/cheap laptop era. 3. And cheap tablets are even cheaper and work great for accessing khan academy and wikipedia as long as you can get free wi-fi somehow. 4. I still think it's a great idea to make computing (including programming) accessible to everyone, be it via web browsers, raspberry Pi, micro bit, cheap laptops/tablets, or whatever.
AussieWog93 5y ago
Honestly, your criticism sounds like it could be extended to non-profit/volunteer work in general; not just OLPC. Without the "meet customer demands or starve" dynamic that places pressure on for-profit organisations, a whole lot of critical but unsexy work just doesn't get done.
- bertil 5y ago
  That’s why I like effective altruism: there’s a lot to be criticised on a purely utilitarian view of help, metrics are often wrong and all that, but any form of self-criticism is such a step-up from the usual white-saviour complex. "We stop this unless we reach that goal" feels horrifying to people on the ground who can’t accept why beneficiaries would be punished, until they realise that, no: you are taking away an unhelpful service. Potentially better options now have a budget. It’s messy and goes in circles but at least it doesn’t stay someone ineffective.
mirekrusin 5y ago
The funny thing about "pet projects" is that successful projects were also "pet projects" – linux, python etc. Nothing wrong with feeding your "pet project" per se.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  Both Linus and Guido are benevolent dictators in their own way but neither of them existed in a vacuum. The lack of iteration and change of direction based on user/field feedback is probably the main difference here.
- amelius 5y ago
  But the point is that it doesn't work the other way around: not all pet projects become successful projects. In fact, very, very few pet projects ever ship.

zozbot234 5y ago

> However, the project placed very little emphasis on the development of boring-but-practical end-user software for the device, like educational games and tools, book reading tools, or course management software. OTOH, I recall that media interest in the OLPC project helped pave the way for the earliest "netbook" class devices, which could readily accommodate these features, and in turn found plenty of use as educational tools in middle-income countries. (Though not in the poorest countries nor in the earliest grades of primary education; in either case, this would have called for rugged subnotebooks - much like the OLPC itself or, more to the point, the Toughbook series which was very costly on the market.)

mjevans 5y ago
The need for '3-4 year old proof' devices is still acutely felt in the first world, where many of the solutions just involve adding a larger back and sides shell and hoping nothing major happens to the screen. It really doesn't help that touchpads generally have oversimplified interfaces and poor support for any sort of peripheral that would aid in greater input speed or acuity. (Bluetooth doesn't count, I hate current wireless so much.)
- elmomle 5y ago
  Why do 3-4 year olds need devices?
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    It's adults who need to keep their devices around where kids are.
  - halpert 5y ago
    They don’t need devices. Parents choose to give them devices because hanging out with kids can be tedious.
    - pugworthy 5y ago
      > hanging out with kids can be tedious. Just wow. Sorry for your kids if you have any, or sorry for your childhood if this is what you were taught. Sorry to be judgemental, but in 30+ years of raising kids, never did the word "tedious" come to mind.
      - halpert 5y ago
        I have a young child. I love hanging out with her, but it’s very repetitive. She’s literally entertained by me holding a rubber giraffe in front of her for hours on end. I don’t blame people for getting bored after days / months. But sure, pass judgement all you want. I really don’t care.

ryukafalz 5y ago

> hardware buttons for software features that were never implemented (particularly "view source") Wasn't this implemented? I don't have my XO-1 in front of me now but I definitely recall being able to do that.

justicezyx 5y ago

You know, they were funded because of these novelty. If you spend more time with international charity activity, you'll see that no one truly want to help the poor, they are more interested in showing their kindness.

KerrAvon 5y ago
I think it’s a bit more complicated than that — wasn’t Negroponte involved with it?
- bmitc 5y ago
  And? https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/09/05/133159/mit-media-lab-jeffrey-epstein-joi-ito-nicholas-negroponte-funding-sex-abuse/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/09/05/133159/mit-media...
lmm 5y ago
I don't think it's quite that. I think it's that the prospect of making reducing poverty your life's work and the end result is that you reduce the world poverty rate by 0.02% is just too oppressive to face head-on. So you either get people who devote themselves to the process rather than the outcome, or you get outcome-oriented people who look for shortcuts and miracle fixes. But that doesn't mean the motive is insincere.

melony 5y ago

There is nothing wrong with the product vision. Remove the part about the handcrank and monochrome screen, and you are basically describing a modern day Macbook. Unfortunately they did not have the budget of Apple to deliver such a device.

kumarsw 5y ago

I'd say this is a fair assessment of the project. It came off as overambitious with a number of high-risk project management decisions made at the expensive of a minimum-viable initial product. And this was just looking at it from an engineering point of view, ignoring whether it did actually provide value over other options for educational spending in developing countries. Funny enough it seems like the hype it generated was its main contribution, which led to the netbook product segment and ultimately Chromebooks. I'd say its spiritual descendent is the humble grades 7-12 school chromebook with much more conventional hardware and software choices. The killer app for school Chromebooks is the combination of Google Docs and whatever Google's classroom management software is, provided cheap to schools in a long-game move by Google to hook a future generation on their office suite. Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations.

zozbot234 5y ago
> Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations. Most likely, Chromebooks are too dependent on the "cloud" to be useful in middle-income countries with comparatively flimsy Internet connectivity. A general-purpose x86 laptop will simply go a lot further there. (And if you put a lightweight OS on it, you will almost never be limited by performance for basic workloads, even on old hardware.)
- killjoywashere 5y ago
  This. I'm in the military, so keenly interested in how much you can do without network. I have two XO-1 laptops and I was a Cr-48 test pilot (their label for their beta testers). I took the Cr-48 with me to Japan for Fukushima in 2011. ChromeOS was not all that useful. Why run ChromeOS when Xubuntu is available? Lubuntu? Pick your favorite lightweight Linux distro. After about a week I cried uncle and installed Xubuntu. Depending on network for the ability to type a document is non-sensical. If I recall, Google Docs didn't have offline mode yet, but due to that experience I have keenly attended to offline mode. It improves things, but it's not a panacea. I don't think a laptop without network is ever going to be as awesome as one with network, but there's a lot of room on a laptop to do more than run AJAX applications in a browser (do they still talk about AJAX?) that offload all the smarts to a server-side app.

dleslie 5y ago

I have two; a friend of mine had one. We both threw Debian on them and relished in the glorious Pixel Qi display and the nigh-indestructible nature of them. Great for backpacking and road trips in dirty areas, at a then-unbeatable price.

b112 5y ago
These shipped? I've been looking for a laptop with eink for a decade, so I can use it in the sun. The new pine e-ink thing gives me hope, with a keyboard, but bah
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > The new pine e-ink thing gives me hope, with a keyboard, but bah Give it some time, they've just about gotten started on the low-level graphics support for that particular device. The next step is coming up with meaningful UX, probably no easy task given how different e-paper is from other sorts of visual output.
- dleslie 5y ago
  Volunteers were able to acquire them early on, then they had the give-1-get-1 programme, and now many are just sitting on Ebay. I bought both of mine for around 200 CAD.
- mavhc 5y ago
  It's not e-ink, it's a transflexive LCD where you can remove the colour and turn off the backlight to get higher res, as the subpixels are setup like a camera (square of RG/GB) instead of the normal 3 vertical subpixels (RGB)

rektide 5y ago

The disjointed efforts & lack of care for the most common use modes are jarring. The inability to get hardware promises really delivered sucked. There were some really good & powerful underlying OS concepts that I think we ought have deep reverence for. Even if the hardware-layer 802.11s wifi mesh didn't work, the systems-layer link-local XMPP mesh, used to create Telepathy Tubes, was ultra-advanced systems engineering that just worked, that was supremely well engineered by discerning sharp choices. There's so many examples of really smart really sharp visionary engineering. To tick off all the places a complete rebuild of the computing experience failed is cheap and easy. Of course there were a lot of pet project hanger-ons, a lot of non-core engineering. It's just a pity we live in such a scarce, chased society, where such a novel engineering project failed to garner the love & attention it deserved. If there's a reason OLPC failed, it's as much because the rest of the world failed to show up for some bold visionary open source engineering. And in my personal view, it's because open source was already chiefly a husk, a shell, for industrial software development. I don't think the world ever really engaged OLPC at the level it deserved, we all failed to explore a delivered viable greatness & make it our own (a difficulty amplified how long it took for Sugar builds to be available on other platforms). The positive powerful lessons XOPC had for us weren't understood or appreciated then, and we're still today hooked on sad story of failure. Rather than anyone bothering to understand the victory & success & power that was built. Out of best of breed open source systems[1]. Effectiveness could have been higher. But this project chose great tech, & it feels as much like an indicator of failure by the geeks who should have seen further. It's hard to form open source community, but there were so many good ideas here, and just a little more getting-the-ball rolling would have lead to a radically different song we sing about this. There was an incredibly interesting platform for software development in a class-room scale, extremely well envisioned, and we all failed to rise to the high standards of possibility this new, vanguard capability set out for. [1] https://www.aosabook.org/en/telepathy.html https://www.aosabook.org/en/telepathy.html

mavhc 5y ago
That's great, but using a load of poor countries to alpha test your new OS ideas seems a bit dodgy. Everyone should have realised inventing something brand new for every part of the stack would fail. We want new hardware, and firmware, and OS design, and GUI design, and apps? And make it all something no one is familiar with?

908B64B197 5y ago

> The project placed excessive emphasis on nonessential high-effort software initiatives, like developing their own BIOS replacement, desktop interface, UI framework, and nonstandard file manager. Developing and supporting this software consumed a lot of time at the Foundation How many of these were funded PhD thesis vs software from salaried devs?

cjbprime 5y ago
None were funded PhD theses -- a mix of salaried devs, donated engineering time from partners like Red Hat, work done by volunteers in purchasing countries like Uruguay, and general open source contributions. (I was a long-time salaried dev for OLPC.)
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Interesting. I assumed the research component was bigger since the project originated at MIT, and that it was one of the reasons they were pushing for a system that didn’t exist at the time instead of porting a known Linux distribution to it.

robinsoh 5y ago

> Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects I'm so glad to see others speaking out about this. I'm 100% in agreement that's what "saviour" projects like MIT Asia, OLPC have all ended up being. > the Pixel Qi display (monochrome mode was poorly utilized by software) I've said this before about the Pixel Qi panel in the XO-1. I'm not attempting to be negative, but I actually work in the display industry and found the PixelQi display on the OLPC-XO-1 to be unusable. My perception of the display was one with very low quality color with backlight; and terrible viewing angle and unreadable contrast levels in bright sunlight. It also had low resolution. The XO-1 display I had access to had lots of pixel defects. If I am not mistaken (as I do not know actual pricing that Quanta got for the PixelQi displays) they were more expensive than LCDs and required additional parts that made managing their supply chain overall difficult. Most experts in my industry that I talked to expressed the opinion that it was a reality-distortion field type charismatic executive (ML Jepsen) who managed to convince people at OLPC to try that idea. It was funded by UN and money from developing countries budgets who were excited by the promise of being able to educate their masses. Sadly it looks as if those countries and their budget expenditures were taken for a ride by Nicholas Negroponte and his gang, rather than benefiting from a genuinely merit based idea.

cjbprime 5y ago
> low resolution Do you mean color resolution? The screen pixel resolution was 1200x900, which was unusually high both for a 7.5" screen, and for a 2007 laptop.
- robinsoh 5y ago
  > The screen pixel resolution was 1200x900, which was unusually high both for a 7.5" screen, and for a 2007 laptop. RGB XGA was dominant by 2006 so I don't think that's accurate.
  - cjbprime 5y ago
    Don't think which part is accurate? 1200x900 has 28% more pixels than XGA, right? (And that XGA was often on a 14" screen instead of a 7.5" screen.)

achow 5y ago

At that time (~2003) I didn't realize the benefit - India govt asked MIT Media lab to leave India due to their high salaries and I guess lack of accountability.. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/business/technology-rift-in-india-leads-mit-to-abandon-a-media-lab.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/business/technology-rift-...

clomond 5y ago

If I may riff and provide a potential view of a tangential alternative force that was at play that made the project destined to be doomed (via this approach you mention about un-implemented features across lower cost legacy hardware) The declining costs of the hardware (screens, capacitive touch, battery, processor, memory, etc etc) via a Wright's Law/ Moore's Law type curve meant that over-optimizing around lowering the costs by choosing 'imperfect' hardware meant it was very difficult to ever get this going as a viable platform - which if we imagine a world of these costs declining 1/4 the rate (4x slower), this ecosystem would have more likely found enough backers and funding to get some more roots and sprouts going. Ultimately, the cost curve declines of the other equipment meant that smartphones/Netbooks/tablets were bound to leapfrog it well before this OLPC 'formulation' was able to take off and be sustainable on its own.

mncharity 5y ago

I (also peripherally involved) suggest OPLC had a unicorn-or-dead business plan, but stalled unexpectedly long in not-quite-dead but not-unicorn-yet, and didn't adapt well. Intel and Microsoft/Gates put a lot of effort towards dead. A unicorn story of "succeed (massive country-wide deployments), and they will come (developers, content creators, educators, etc; also network and power infrastructure, next-gen laptops, maintenance and deployment infrastructure, supply chains, etc)" means you're doing a minimum viable unicorn launch. So for illustration, when you're bouncing along, running out of runway, and Guido (python BDFL) publishes clueless criticisms, and the python open-source community isn't "showing up" to help, do you spend scarce funds on hiring a community outreach person to nudge that, or focus on making your next bounce just that little bit higher enough to ignite your unicorn rocket engine, and make training wheels and bootstrap wings a non-issue? Especially when a critical bottleneck isn't technical, but Bill flying around offering politicians Microsoft and Gates Foundation bounties on unicorn eggs. So I suggest the goal was to trigger mass deployments, supporting subsequent refinement. I'm unclear on what/which technical improvements might have been sufficient to alter the deployment outcome. But people have been critiquing the unicorn-pathfinder-prototype-alpha-preview-0.0.3 unicorn corpse ever since. :)

musicale 5y ago

> Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects, rather than as a means to a specific educational/humanitarian goal. This severely compromised the effectiveness of the project. Be that as it may: 1. The research projects were kind of cool. 2. I suspect that OLPC paved the way for the netbook/chromebook/cheap laptop era. 3. And cheap tablets are even cheaper and work great for accessing khan academy and wikipedia as long as you can get free wi-fi somehow. 4. I still think it's a great idea to make computing (including programming) accessible to everyone, be it via web browsers, raspberry Pi, micro bit, cheap laptops/tablets, or whatever.

AussieWog93 5y ago

Honestly, your criticism sounds like it could be extended to non-profit/volunteer work in general; not just OLPC. Without the "meet customer demands or starve" dynamic that places pressure on for-profit organisations, a whole lot of critical but unsexy work just doesn't get done.

bertil 5y ago
That’s why I like effective altruism: there’s a lot to be criticised on a purely utilitarian view of help, metrics are often wrong and all that, but any form of self-criticism is such a step-up from the usual white-saviour complex. "We stop this unless we reach that goal" feels horrifying to people on the ground who can’t accept why beneficiaries would be punished, until they realise that, no: you are taking away an unhelpful service. Potentially better options now have a budget. It’s messy and goes in circles but at least it doesn’t stay someone ineffective.

mirekrusin 5y ago

The funny thing about "pet projects" is that successful projects were also "pet projects" – linux, python etc. Nothing wrong with feeding your "pet project" per se.

DoingIsLearning 5y ago
Both Linus and Guido are benevolent dictators in their own way but neither of them existed in a vacuum. The lack of iteration and change of direction based on user/field feedback is probably the main difference here.
amelius 5y ago
But the point is that it doesn't work the other way around: not all pet projects become successful projects. In fact, very, very few pet projects ever ship.