3 ms·

To me, the OLPC effort is a pretty of potent demonstration of why you need more than good intentions to make a success. My generation grew up in an age where,

To me, the OLPC effort is a pretty of potent demonstration of why you need more than good intentions to make a success. My generation grew up in an age where, for better and worse, the technology leaders also turned out to be pretty savvy businessmen (say what you will about Gates, Jobs, Ellison, et al they knew how to build an empire). But no one seems to realize how extraordinary that is or how important good business management can be. These guys have failed to meet every deadline, gone over every budget and missed every price point they've ever tried to hit. It was going to catch up to them eventually.

colinplamondon 18y ago
Even their intentions weren't all that good- from the beginning this was about sticking it to Microsoft, not about helping kids in developing nations learn.
- andreyf 18y ago
  That's really mean. You can't generalize about that many people - care to name who, exactly, you are talking about? IMO, everyone has different motives, and those I know anything about were 100% care-driven. The people I know who worked on OLPC have no beef with MS whatsoever, use MS products every day, but believe strongly that proprietary software has a very different role to play in the long-run that it does now. In countries that can pay it, software and marketing are a significant cost in producing computers, one that is passed on to the customer. Now, in an over-abundant economy like ours (USA), this is not morally questionable - without advertising budgets, my children would have nothing to eat. However, when you're talking about a country that will be increasing Microsoft's bottom line instead of investing in roads or basic education, that's plain wrong.
  - cgranade 18y ago
    I mostly agree, but I must take slight issue with the point about imposing a significant cost being morally unquestionable. Microsoft, to follow the example, has gained an unfair monopoly, and has exploited such to prevent possibly superior products from reaching acceptance. Moreover, Microsoft has abused the patent system to shut out still more potential competitors, and enforce vendor lock-in (see, for example, patent disputes with OOXML). Thus, I submit that Microsoft imposes a disproportionally large cost to society for what benefits it gives, and therefore can be said to be acting in an immoral fashion. That is, Microsoft makes their profits directly at the cost of society's happiness, which is immoral by a utilitarian view. Now, far be it for me to pick at MS in exclusivity-- they were simply a convenient example. Rather, I only mean to illustrate that the moral questions of a monopoly in technology (be it hardware or software) are not completely dissolved in an affluent society, but only reduced.
    - andreyf 18y ago
      ...which is immoral by a utilitarian view. I think your argument is sound, but I was thinking about a more intuitive form of morality. When I have to pay an extra $x for Windows or OSX, that comes out of some books I'll buy, or some extra private saxophone/french lessons for my daughter, or maybe a new Wii. When a third-world country pays extra, that's money which could be spent on building infrastructure for millions of people who will die without it.
- jacobolus 18y ago
  Whose intentions? Let's hear some names here. Nicholas Negroponte's intentions? Walter Bender's? Mary Lou Jepsen's? Samuel Klein's (who put up this blog post)? How did you decide the main point from the beginning was to stick it to Microsoft? You certainly wouldn't have heard it directly from anyone working there. Do you see inside their heads? (Note that all of these people worked at salaries dramatically lower than what they'd get in industry or even academia, for at least a couple of years of their lives. Would you do that just to "stick it to" some company you didn't like?)
  - jrockway 18y ago
    Would you do that just to "stick it to" some company you didn't like? Yes. It might be better to phrase it like, "I'm changing the world", though.
andreyf 18y ago
you need more than good intentions to make a success Does this point really need any more demonstration? You don't see Mister Rogers manning the gears of capitalism, do you? However, don't be so cynical as to think this is a Law of the Universe. It is simply a fashion of our times, and might very well change.
jacobolus 18y ago
> These guys have failed to meet every deadline, gone over every budget and missed every price point they've ever tried to hit. It was going to catch up to them eventually. That's because (a) all of the deadlines and price points were wildly optimistic from the beginning, and (b) all five of the countries who committed to buying a million laptops each in the first year backed out (in Thailand there was a coup, etc. etc.). But the achievements so far have been quite impressive. You'd also have trouble meeting a price point estimated for a scale of tens or hundreds of millions of laptops when you were only shipping a few hundred thousand. There's a big bulk discount that comes with 2 extra orders of magnitude in purchasing.
- StrawberryFrog 18y ago
  "hat's because all of the deadlines and price points were wildly optimistic from the beginning" Wild optimism goes some way to explaining it. But not to excusing it.
  - jacobolus 18y ago
    Fair enough. The implication though was that the project has been a miserable failure. I don't think that's a reasonable assessment. How many other projects of a few dozen people have had a larger impact over the past 2–3 years?

colinplamondon 18y ago

Even their intentions weren't all that good- from the beginning this was about sticking it to Microsoft, not about helping kids in developing nations learn.

andreyf 18y ago
That's really mean. You can't generalize about that many people - care to name who, exactly, you are talking about? IMO, everyone has different motives, and those I know anything about were 100% care-driven. The people I know who worked on OLPC have no beef with MS whatsoever, use MS products every day, but believe strongly that proprietary software has a very different role to play in the long-run that it does now. In countries that can pay it, software and marketing are a significant cost in producing computers, one that is passed on to the customer. Now, in an over-abundant economy like ours (USA), this is not morally questionable - without advertising budgets, my children would have nothing to eat. However, when you're talking about a country that will be increasing Microsoft's bottom line instead of investing in roads or basic education, that's plain wrong.
- cgranade 18y ago
  I mostly agree, but I must take slight issue with the point about imposing a significant cost being morally unquestionable. Microsoft, to follow the example, has gained an unfair monopoly, and has exploited such to prevent possibly superior products from reaching acceptance. Moreover, Microsoft has abused the patent system to shut out still more potential competitors, and enforce vendor lock-in (see, for example, patent disputes with OOXML). Thus, I submit that Microsoft imposes a disproportionally large cost to society for what benefits it gives, and therefore can be said to be acting in an immoral fashion. That is, Microsoft makes their profits directly at the cost of society's happiness, which is immoral by a utilitarian view. Now, far be it for me to pick at MS in exclusivity-- they were simply a convenient example. Rather, I only mean to illustrate that the moral questions of a monopoly in technology (be it hardware or software) are not completely dissolved in an affluent society, but only reduced.
  - andreyf 18y ago
    ...which is immoral by a utilitarian view. I think your argument is sound, but I was thinking about a more intuitive form of morality. When I have to pay an extra $x for Windows or OSX, that comes out of some books I'll buy, or some extra private saxophone/french lessons for my daughter, or maybe a new Wii. When a third-world country pays extra, that's money which could be spent on building infrastructure for millions of people who will die without it.
jacobolus 18y ago
Whose intentions? Let's hear some names here. Nicholas Negroponte's intentions? Walter Bender's? Mary Lou Jepsen's? Samuel Klein's (who put up this blog post)? How did you decide the main point from the beginning was to stick it to Microsoft? You certainly wouldn't have heard it directly from anyone working there. Do you see inside their heads? (Note that all of these people worked at salaries dramatically lower than what they'd get in industry or even academia, for at least a couple of years of their lives. Would you do that just to "stick it to" some company you didn't like?)
- jrockway 18y ago
  Would you do that just to "stick it to" some company you didn't like? Yes. It might be better to phrase it like, "I'm changing the world", though.

andreyf 18y ago

you need more than good intentions to make a success Does this point really need any more demonstration? You don't see Mister Rogers manning the gears of capitalism, do you? However, don't be so cynical as to think this is a Law of the Universe. It is simply a fashion of our times, and might very well change.

jacobolus 18y ago

> These guys have failed to meet every deadline, gone over every budget and missed every price point they've ever tried to hit. It was going to catch up to them eventually. That's because (a) all of the deadlines and price points were wildly optimistic from the beginning, and (b) all five of the countries who committed to buying a million laptops each in the first year backed out (in Thailand there was a coup, etc. etc.). But the achievements so far have been quite impressive. You'd also have trouble meeting a price point estimated for a scale of tens or hundreds of millions of laptops when you were only shipping a few hundred thousand. There's a big bulk discount that comes with 2 extra orders of magnitude in purchasing.

StrawberryFrog 18y ago
"hat's because all of the deadlines and price points were wildly optimistic from the beginning" Wild optimism goes some way to explaining it. But not to excusing it.
- jacobolus 18y ago
  Fair enough. The implication though was that the project has been a miserable failure. I don't think that's a reasonable assessment. How many other projects of a few dozen people have had a larger impact over the past 2–3 years?