The Sugar daddy for future generations
It's not too hard to think up grandiose ideas to change the world, but very few people attempt to put them into effect - and even fewer succeed. Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman emeritus of MIT's Media Lab, made the attempt with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, and he isn't beaten yet.
Negroponte hoped to sell machines by the million to world leaders, with volume production driving down prices. But large contracts failed to materialise, and when the XO laptop went into production towards the end of 2007, the price was still around $188 (pounds 133) per machine. Quite a few of those were sold to US buyers on a "Give One, Get One" programme: you paid for two and the other went to a child.
But the project has taken a battering. In 2007, OLPC's chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, resigned to start a new company, Pixel Qi, to develop XO ideas separately. Last April, software boss Walter Bender also left, founding Sugar Labs to develop the XO's Linux-based Sugar software separately. This year, the OLPC has shed half its staff, with the remaining 32 members taking pay cuts.
But Negroponte does not sound downhearted. "OLPC should have trimmed sooner," he says. "We have since grown stronger. Almost all the cutbacks were in engineering staff related to the in-house support of Sugar, which is far better done in the community."
He has also been round the world and seen XO laptops making an impact. Adding up the score, he says: "There are 600,000 laptops in the field, 250,000 in transit and another 380,000 about to be made, so the total adds up to about 1.2m. Thirty-one countries in 19 languages are the exact statistics. It's less than I anticipated, but still gratifying."
With the XO-1 now being deployed in the field, interest is turning to a follow-on project: the XO-2. This will be a $75 dual-screen device that's held like a book. You can also turn it around and use one of the screens as the keyboard.
"The first generation is a laptop that can be a book; the next generation will a book that can be a laptop," he says. "That's the switch.
"One important thing about the XO-2 is that we're going to do it as an open source hardware programme. The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google - we'll want people to copy it. We'll make the constituent parts available. We'll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1.
"We had to do the XO this way because everybody said it couldn't be done. We purposely designed a special-purpose, award-winning museum of modern art piece. The next one will be different: everything from the dual display to the touch-sensitive, force-feedback, haptic keyboard will be available."
Read the full story at : The Guardian