Design Article
Another view: iPad reality versus OLPC fantasy
Bill Schweber
1/30/2010 2:40 PM EST
In brief, unlike the constantly morphing basic, inexpensive, stripped-down PC of their first promises, this latest item looks like a basic, inexpensive, stripped-down tablet computer. The media–which has breathlessly and uncritically reported nearly every OLPC pre-announcement since they stated their intention to saturate the world with these PCs–gave this latest news some attention, of course, but the iPad pre-announcement mania sucked a lot of the air from the PR room, as they say in marketing-speak.
You can argue, as I have, ("One Laptop Per Child hit by competitive reality") that the entire OLPC effort is (pick one or more):
- a) misguided;
- b) fundamentally the wrong type of product for the needs of the impoverished target audience;
- c) an attempt to assuage our high-tech guilt;
- d) an evangelical manifestation of salvation via PC
In contrast, the OLPC world seems to exist by promising that reality is just around the corner, and the next corner, and then next one. In the end, what they promise changes so much between inception and delivery that you don't know what you're getting. The press certainly seems infatuated with the ostensibly noble mission of OLPC, Nicholas Negroponte, and the MIT Media Lab, that's for sure.
My intention is not to bash OLPC and be done. There is absolutely a need and place for visionaries and dreamers in our technical ecosystem. But at some point, you have to decide which group you fall into: talker or doer. If you are in the second group, you have to stop talking and start delivering, which the OLPC mindset never seems to get around to doing. In their world, good intentions and feeling good about what you're doing are really what count.
The problem I have is that given all the adulation and uncritical accolades they have received, this combination of vision plus vaporware can infect our industry and become a marketing strategy used by others. That's not good. While we certainly do need the dreamers, those dreams have to become firm reality. Otherwise, we erode our credibility with the consumer, those folks we expect to spend real money to buy our physical realizations of the promises. It's a dangerous strategy to excessively laud those who think that dreams and promises are enough, and that those alone will keep us and our customers happy for the long term.♦
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betajet
2/1/2010 1:29 PM EST
According to the OLPC Wikipedia article, OLPC had confirmed orders from 2007-2009
of 1,284,500 computers. This is hardly an "OLPC fantasy" -- these are real machines being used by real children thoughout the developing world. An addition, many countries have pilot programs.
While OLPC did not reach their original goals of a $100 computer, I believe that was largely because of insufficient volume due to competition. When for-profit manufacturers saw that OLPC was real, they created their own netbooks to maintain market share. However, if it hadn't been for OLPC I very much doubt that those netbooks would have been developed as soon as they were.
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carolruthsilver
3/17/2011 2:23 AM EDT
Bashing do-gooders like the OLPC crowd may be fun.
But if the i-Pad is an Apple, then OLPC's education project utilizing its XO laptop, is an Orange. They overlap in many ways, because they are both marvels of technology, just as apples and oranges are both fruits and both round.
Just to begin to compare them: OLPC is directed at small, immature humans who are just beginning to be able to derive meaning from periodic designs displayed against a contrasting background, known as reading. The i-Pad in its most striking innovations relieves humans from the need to read, because it communicates through voice and images. Now, some may argue that learning to read has become an anachronistic
and unnecessary luxury in our brave new world of direct i-Pad enabled communication, just as calculators have replaced slide rules, and digital watches replaced round marked-off circles for telling time, which had replaced sundials. But we would probably not make that choice for our own children, and for children in the developing world, would we really want them to be totally beholden to the tech companies of their nation states for the most basic information, the kind of information which we-all have acquired primarily by reading?
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