Another OLPC man goes his own way

Sam Varghese
Sunday, 24 August 2008 22:16

Opinion and Analysis

Another stalwart of the One Laptop per Child Project has gone his own way - after telling project founder Nicholas Negroponte that he (Negroponte) had failed to go beyond the stage of a prototype.
Aaron Kaplan, founder and an active member of OLPC Austria, in a post on the OLPC News website, wrote: "Nicholas: in case you read this. Intel won. Big time. It will be hard to compete against the Dells and Intels of this world. We all knew that and you did not accept the fact. However where you could have been unique, outstanding and special was - guess what - with education software out of the labs of MIT and surrounding institutions and projects..."

For the uninitiated, OLPC is a project masterminded by MIT media labs chief Negroponte to supply laptops to children; it has morphed from a $US100 laptop to a $US188 model and had a fair number of hiccups in its short existence.

Kaplan was referring to two news items - one that OLPC had refused to sell 900 test XOs to the government of Chile because it was considered too small a number. The second was a news item that Intel and the Portuguese government had inrtoduced production of the Magalhaes, "a Classmate-based computer that will be produced in Portugal and distributed to Portuguese children on primary education for €50 (free or at €20 for students on social aid), as well as exported to other countries."

Kaplan wrote: "Nicholas, you are a visionary, yes! You captured the imagination of many. But Intel actually carried the vision further and created a real product. Creating a real product is so much harder than prototyping.

"And no, it does not help to to whine that Intel and the big giants are against you. You tried to beat the giants at their own game. But when you try to do that, then you actually have to be better than the big boys. Your sales department was not. It was too small. It was only you for a long time.

"Just the other day somebody from Holland called me and asked how he could contact Walter de Brouwer (the supposedly OLPC Europe manager, almost none of us in Europe ever saw him).

"Seems like wdb is not answering emails anymore for potential customers. Face the facts. In case OLPC fails then it is your own fault. Maybe you can still make customers happy with another G1G1. But, you know... the hardware industry is moving so immensely fast. Who will still want an XO-1 apart from the design value and the geek factor?"