OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world

The real reason why OLPC failed is that children in downtrodden countries don't need a laptop. They need food, a healthy environment, good old fashioned classroom education and plenty of pens and notebooks. A laptop is the worst tool you can use for studying.

I went through my entire school and undergraduate college without once bringing my laptop into the classroom. My mother and father learned to program in FORTRAN using nothing but pen, paper and the occasional slide rule.

Paper books, decent sized notebooks and ballpoint pens. Spend $100 on that. That will actually help. This whole project was solving a first world problem in the third world.

I thought it was crap, too, until I read:

The cheapest way to give 100 books to someone in the third world is to give them a laptop (and a way to power it.)

Also, for most of their target audience, the laptop would be the brightest source of light in their home.

This image, in particular:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6990034.stm

So, no, don't think of it as a "laptop," it's just an educational device in a laptop form factor.

That said, I had major problems with how OLPC executed on that vision.

So... do you need a laptop for that or an eReader?

Granted eReaders were a niche at the time of OLPC, we didn't fully grok where laptops fell on the useful vs distracting scale and the idea of a general purpose computer you could also teach kids to code on seemed really really cool and probably the best way to on-board them onto the internet.

All in all, OLPC's heart was in the right place, but until we know how to properly introduce computers into the classroom as a general purpose educational device, something more like a rugged eReader and open source textbooks feels like it would be more productive in accomplishing at least some of the goals of OLPC.

> do you need a laptop for that or an eReader?

An ereader already contains all of the hardware to be an interactive computer (especially if it has a keyboard, like the kindle 1, 2 and 3). It really shouldn't cost any more to deploy an Alan Kay-style dynabook than to deploy ereader appliances.

> the idea of a general purpose computer you could also teach kids to code on seemed really really cool

The idea wasn't that you could teach programming with the aid of the computers. The idea was that you could teach everything with the aid of computers.

Is the Kindle profitable on its own? I thought it was sold at cost or at a loss with the expectation it would lead to more profitable ebook sales.