As we reported last month, Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort has had rocky times recently. The company has just announced a partnership with Microsoft to put Windows on OLPC laptops, although Linux-based open source versions of the sub-$200 laptops will stay in production. The laptops are targeted at children in developing nations. Recently, several key executives have left the project, including former president Walter Bender. Questions swirled about Bender's reasons for leaving OLPC, but now, in a surprise twist, he has resurfaced. Bender has announced Sugar Labs, a new foundation focused on taking the Sugar user interface in the OLPC laptops to other hardware platforms.
According to a release from Sugar Labs:
"Sugar Labs Foundation is being established to further extend Sugar, the highly acclaimed open source βlearn learningβ software platform that was originally developed for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) XO laptop. Sugar is the core of the XO laptop's human-computer interface; it provides a fun, easy-to-use, social experience that promotes sharing and learning. Sugar Labs will focus on providing a software ecosystem that enhances learning on the XO laptop as well as other laptops distributed by other companies, such as the ASUS Eee PC. Consistent with the OLPC mission to provide opportunities for learning, an independent Sugar Labs Foundation can deliver learning software to other hardware vendors and, consequently, reach more children."
Many of the core Sugar developers are participating in the launch, including Marco Pesenti Gritti, Bert Freudenberg, Simon Schampijer, Bernardo Innocenti, Aaron Kaplan, Christoph Derndorfer, and Tomeu Vizoso. Bender himself came originally from MIT Media Labs.
Bert Freudenberg, one of the developers, has added:
"Expanding Sugar to more hardware platforms gives a great boost to all developers of educational software. Sugar is the first system specifically aimed at helping children to learn while supporting a rich variety of contributed applications. As third-party developers, my colleagues at Viewpoints Research Institute look forward to a great relationship with Sugar Labs.β
So this week shows how many seismic changes are going on at OLPC. Windows versions of the OLPC laptops will cost about the same ($180) as the Linux-based versions, but if the Windows versions become popular, that throws into question the future of the Linux-based machines.
Meanwhile, Asus is an example of a company that has had tremendous success selling inexpensive Linux-based laptops, with its Eee PCs. The company now has a Windows version of the Eee PCs as well. With the Sugar open source platform extending out to manufacturers such as Asus, the platform originally devised for OLPC may reach many more users.
Governments, so far, have ordered about 600,000 OLPC laptops--well below projections. However, Asus is forecasting sales of its Eee PCs doubling to 1.2 million units in the second quarter, and reaching 5 million units this year. At this point, there is every reason to believe that the open source platform that caused so many news headlines on the OLPC project will reach far more machines in the standard consumer hardware market. For more good analysis on this story, see our sister blog GigaOm's analysis.
Do you think OLPC and Sugar Labs are headed in the right directions?
Comments
Add CommentBy Sebastian on May. 16, 2008
Sugar Labs is definitely heading into the right direction. The Sugar UI is innovative stuff, developing it outside of the OLPC process is definitely a good idea.
For OLPC, this is different.
If selling Windows increases sales of the laptop and helps to solving the world's poverty problems on the long term, I can just say: Go for it!
I doubt that Windows will solve their problems, though. Asus was successful with a Linux-based computer, why shouldn't the OLPC be successful, too?
I fear the problem is more that governments fear that the devices could be stolen and resold, or that the devices are simply a very expensive thing without a guaranteed success, combined with the fact that the OLPC has proven to be much more expensive than originally hoped.
By an anonymous user on May. 16, 2008
The OLPC problem is one of distribution strategy. Asus is selling directly to the consumer, OLPC wants to sell to governments who are not computer literate and wants to restrict this to the third world. Because the per capita income is so low there, individuals cannot buy. Hence, the idea of going through governments. Straight forwards logic for someone who spends time in a lab where there are no humans.
Two issues: (i) the idea of one computer per child is not sensible in most countries where governments don't have the money to spend on computers a la OLPC. In the majority of developing world countries, the annual budget per student is a fraction of what the OLPC costs over 10 years. So, there is no market there.
(ii) when the buyer is not computer literate, it is a stretch to assume that he will appreciate the use of computers in the classroom.
(iii) the assumption that kids will discover the computer on their own without being introduced to it doesn't hold. The problems reported about OLPC in Peru with respect to the need to train teachers so that they can guide students is evidence of the fallacy of OLPC learning model assumption.
To summarize: the mere fact that Asus which sports a lot less features than OLPC and cost more is better sold is an indication of OLPC failed business model. OLPC does not want to sell directly to individuals because it does not have a distribution infrastructure (we are talking about the developing world here where there is no electronic commerce and well established distributors of computers). The only time it tried was with the buy 2 get one, and even then, they didn't feel like it was the right thing to do (hence the gimmick).
OLPC would have been better of coming out and saying: we are going to get these computers given free to the developing world and thus, get underwriters for the program from the get go, or go business approach simply and sell in the developed and developing world and use the profits from the developed world where there is an easier market to capture and economies of scale to subsidize OLPC developing world.
Going with windows xp is not a guarantee for success unless the distribution strategy is changed. Microsoft might give them money, but that will not solve the fundamental business model flaw.
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