OLPC Project: Success, Failure and Potential Future

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project created a buzz in technology world when it announced that it would introduce a $100 laptop which will go for mass production and be distributed among the millions of under-privileged poor children in the third world countries. The project started its journey in January 2005 under the leadership of a MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte who set up a target of distributing 7 million $100 laptops among the poor school children through the governments of third world countries.

OLPC is a non-profit organization and it initially decided that it would sell XO laptops on a large scale only to the governments of the countries who are willing to provide free OLCP laptops to the school children. It is true that OLPC has not been able to reach the $100 price yet, and it has so far sold about 1 million laptops across 31 countries (according to Negroponte), way behind from its 7-million target. Well, does not mean that OLPC project has failed totally?

Success

To be honest, I think, OLPC’s idea of $100 laptop has become an epoch-making idea in the computer world. The very first idea of today’s increasingly popular netbook came from OLPC. Today, we know that netbook is the fastest growing computer segment globally, but when OLPC came up with the idea of a small laptop capable of doing the basic tasks, many were skeptical about the potential of such a laptop. However, now you can see that computer market has been flooded by netbooks from various companies. Giving the idea of netbook is perhaps the first and foremost success of OLPC.

Let us now come to the fact. I already mentioned that one million XO laptops are currently in use in the classrooms of 31 developing countries including Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethiopia, Libia etc. No matter what the initial target was; the fact is that about 1 million poor children from some of the poorest countries of the world are now using XO laptops. They are using internet and learning many other things. Most importantly, they are learning through playing without feeling the burden of traditional learning. I am not sure eve if the school children of all European countries are able to use laptop in the classroom. The idea of taking laptops to the children of the third world countries was beyond anybody’s imagination before the inception of OLPC. Now, those poor children who can not even eat three times a day are using laptops and internet. Don’t you think it is a big achievement for OLPC? If your answer is still no, then I have nothing no say.

Failure

The biggest failure is perhaps the price tag. It promised to deck out netbook with a $100 price tag, but at this moment, only the production cost of a XO laptop stands at $188 (not including the market and distribution fees as wells as taxes). This is definitely one of the failures if you only stick to what OLPC promised initially. Another failure could be that OLPC failed to reach 7 million children that it had targeted initially. In fact, they could reach only 1 million people.

To be honest, I do not think that OLPC is solely responsible for these two failures. First of all, world economy went through a recession over the last two years. Many rich countries faced unprecedented economic problems, many business organizations collapsed and many lost jobs. Naturally, the economic condition of the third world countries was not good either. Recession put its mark on many third world countries too as the amount of financial helps from rich countries were significantly decreased. This perhaps caused a problem for OLPC to reach its target of 7 million. Meanwhile, the price of many computer equipments increased due to lower sales. It was perhaps one of the reasons OLPC failed to reach its $100 price.

Can OLPC Grow More?

The answer is yes. First of all, the recession is pretty much over and I think, if OLPC can make good promotion of its laptop, it is very possible many other third world countries will be interested to provide their school children with XO laptop. The biggest thing is that there is no other viable competitor of OLPC in the market. Intel’s Classmate PC does not target the students of third world countries who are the only target users of XO laptop. So, OLPC can penetrate the market without having to think about what its competitor is offering. This is a big advantage of OLPC.

Moreover, reports out in the media suggests that OLPC is going to feature a more powerful motherboard and VIA C7-M processor in XO 1.5 which is ready to be launched. VIA C7-M processor is expected to be significantly more powerful than AMD Geode processor which is now powering XO laptops. The new version of XO laptop will also feature larger flash SSD storage and larger RAM. Overall, XO 1.5 laptop will reportedly be able to run on Windows 7 operating system. Negroponte said that the countries can choose between Windows and Sugar.

What is Sugar? Well, the current XO laptops provide a friendly interface named Sugar in order to accelerate child-learning. Sugar is totally free and offer automatic backup, built-in collaboration and many other features that are conducive for children. The most important thing is that the laptop can boot Sugar from flash drive which is not possible for any Windows operating system. Sugar Labs produce the child-friendly software.

If the media reports are to be believed, all these improved features will be available with XO 1.5 laptops without adding to its current price tag. The reason perhaps is that Quanta, the manufacturers of XO laptops, is going for large scale production for XO 1.5 laptops, and thus, reducing the unit cost.

I also read about a possible XO-2 dual-display laptop without any keyboard. At last 300 beta version of this XO laptop are now under testing. Though nothing details about the laptop has been released yet. However, I guess that it will feature touch screen and this way, it will not need to feature any keyboard. However, I am not sure about its specifications.

Media

Reports out in the media suggest that OLPC failed to make a good relationship with media. Specially, when it comes to effective interaction with media, OLPC comes short on making an effective interaction with media. In this age, OLPC people should make a very good workable relationship with media. Many times in the past, OLPC left media in the dark about any coming event of OLPC and this approach only backfired for the company. So, from now, OLPC should let the media know about their future products, possible release dates of the products and other things from time to time.

How Can OLPC Make a Significant Growth?

OLPC has taken up a great initiative of bringing the poor school children to technology. In order to reach their ‘7 million’ and ‘$100 laptop’ targets, I think, OLPC can seriously think about launching a netbook for the commercial market. If it can comes up with a commercial laptop for a price tag of around $200 and goes for mass production, then I think, it would be easier for OLPC to reach its original target of bringing out a $100 laptop. How? Well, OLPC can use all the profits of its commercial netbook segment in XO laptops. It can invest more money in research and development sector. If the commercial netbook works well, then OLPC can also think of producing a competitor of Intel Classmate PC for the European market. Overall, the commercial netbook segment would only help OLPC reach its original goal.