3 ms·
I have never figured out the causal direction of Yves Béhar's fiascos and flops (OLPC, Theranos, Juicero, Ouya, among many). Was it the hubris of the founders w
by kepano 2y ago
I have never figured out the causal direction of Yves Béhar's fiascos and flops (OLPC, Theranos, Juicero, Ouya, among many). Was it the hubris of the founders who wanted their products designed by Béhar, or was it the design of the products themselves?
- cjbprime 2y agoI worked on OLPC, and wouldn't assign much fault to Yves (although there was a heavily publicized hand crank on the side of the first designs that turned out to fail to a few minutes of serious thought). Like you're imagining, the sort of people whose primary talent is to acquire funding through exciting demonstrations end up hiring people who are good at creating exciting demonstrations, as a correlation. The MIT Media Lab (where OLPC originated) was all about exciting demonstrations. Other "exciting" agencies were involved: Pentagram owned the UI/UX design work despite, I think, never having worked on software design/development before. (In OLPC's case I think all of this turned out surprisingly well, but people will disagree. It's easy to say "oh they should have used Android/iOS" before realizing that neither existed at the time.)
- karmakaze 2y agoI don't know about the others but OLPC was trying to solve a 2nd order problem (education) when the 1st order problem, clean water, food, etc wasn't solved. A case of a solution being fitted to the user rather than the most pressing needs of said user, which can happen without appreciating a vastly different culture/context. The most useful feature of OLPC was as a flashlight.