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Seriously, they dawdled around so long it became irrelevant before they actually launched. If they had sold them to anyone who wanted one they would have been m
by dan_the_welder 17y ago
Seriously, they dawdled around so long it became irrelevant before they actually launched.
If they had sold them to anyone who wanted one they would have been making money to further their development as well as exposing the hardware to thousands of potential developers.
Then Microsoft got in on them and netbooks appeared and that was all she wrote.
This is not a MS bash, but a hardware resources and price point issue.
- netsp 17y agoThere's sort of a catch 22. If they made money by selling them to anyone who wanted one, that would imply that people who could afford one might want one. It would imply that these are viable to produce for a market. In that case, what do we really need a non profit for? Get this hardware to developing country children? Put together a software package? Lobby the governments to allocate funds to the OLPC mission? None of those are really OLPC.
- dan_the_welder 17y agoPersonally I think non-profits are a stupid idea, having seen a number of them hijacked by people of less than stellar intentions. If you want to service a need then start a business. If you want to serve a low margin market, then figure out a low cost business model and run with it. There is something romantic about the whole non-profit thing that just seems narcoticly attractive to idealistic people who think of business as evil. Business is not evil inherently, just some implementations of it and it has somehow soiled the whole thing for a generation who are mooning around for something of meaning to fill their workdays. The scope of meaning has unfortunately been reduced to working at a nonprofit. Makes me ill.