The One Laptop Per Child project has announced that its Chief Technology Officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, is leaving the project to focus on commercializing the display technology she developed as part of the OLPC project. Computerworld describes this as a "blow" to the OLPC project, but I don't think that's necessarily true. It's hard to say without an insider's perspective, but it may be that this is just a natural development for an organization that's transitioning from a (non-profit) tech startup to a more mature technology organization. Traditional for-profit startups often see some of their early technologists leave the firm once the initial technology-development phase is completed. The skills required to develop cutting-edge technology are different from the skills needed to run a large technology company, and so people who don't want to do the latter often leave companies once they're off the ground. What I think this does illustrate, though, is that despite large differences in rhetoric, there's not that much difference between a non-profit technology organization and a for-profit technology company. Both are trying to develop cutting-edge technologies that will be useful to a lot of people. Both face challenges with holding down costs and finding the right market. As I've said before, OLPC might be more successful if it thought more like a technology company, looking for paying customers and ways to cut costs. Having former employees commercializing OLPC-based technologies can only help nudge the organization in the right direction.

Always nice to see two unrelated topics that we discuss on Techdirt come together in a single story. A bunch of folks have been sending in the news that the One Laptop Per Child program has been hit with a patent infringement suit in Nigeria. The company claims that the OLPC folks "reverse engineered" its four shift keys on a keyboard, in order to better handle multiple languages. While we think the OLPC project has all sorts of problems, that doesn't mean we think highly of using the patent system to shut down a project that clearly was intended for the greater good, rather than for profit. It will be interesting to see the details of the case as they come out. By claiming that OLPC "reverse engineered" their product (and, honestly, do you really need to "reverse engineer" four shift keys?), it sounds like they're accusing the organization of willful infringement, which could be a lot costlier. Either way, nice to know that the fascination over patent litigation isn't avoiding charitable ventures either.

When the One Laptop Per Child project announced its "Give One Get One" program in September, I praised it as an opportunity to get some laptops in the hands of real users. And apparently the program has proven a big hit, raking in as much as $2 million a day in revenues. With numbers like that a normal firm would be looking for ways to expand the program. But not OLPC. While they have extended the program through the end of the year, Nicholas Negroponte is apparently anxious to phase it out after New Years, so that they can focus on a "give only" strategy. It almost seems like Negroponte believes there's something dirty about having people actually pay for his product. That doesn't make any sense. There's nothing wrong with making a profit, especially when those profits would presumably be plowed into giving away more free laptops to poor kids. Somebody has started a website devoted to talking some sense into Negroponte and the rest of the OLPC project. They advocate not only continuing to sell laptops to interested parties in the developed world, but also making the laptops available for purchase, possibly at a discount, in poor countries. This makes a lot of sense. It will allow the OLPC program to gain a foothold in countries whose governments aren't necessarily interested in buying the laptops in batches of 100,000. And it will ensure that the first laptops go to places where they'll actually be used. It's hard to see what the downside is. Negroponte will still be free to solicit government contracts, or to approach Western donors to finance larger gifts. A tech startup would be crazy to turn down an opportunity like this, and doing so doesn't make any more sense for OLPC.

It also appears that Negroponte is still bitter at Intel for introducing a competing low-price laptop. His angst seems rather misplaced. The goal is to get laptops into the hands of poor kids. If that goal is being accomplished, it doesn' really matter whose laptop ends up being the most popular. Poor countries have as much right to seek the best products they can get as anyone else. Intel has apparently used its considerable engineering resources to produce an attractive alternative to the XO. If third-world governments choose Intel's laptop over his own, Negroponte should be congratulating them for helping achieve the goal of universal laptop ownership, not griping about the fact that his product didn't make the cut. Besides, it's a big world. There are thousands of different computer models being sold in the developed world. Why would anyone think that a single laptop could possibly meet the needs of hundreds of millions of poor kids?

The One-Laptop-per-Child project, which the press is still referring to as the "$100 laptop" despite the fact that it now costs twice that, finally began rolling off the assembly line this week. What's most striking about the effort is how dramatically Nicholas Negroponte has had to scale back his formerly lofty ambitions to get the project off the ground. He initially said that they'd need 3 million orders before they started production. Those orders never materialized, so now they're starting production with only one order, from Uruguay, for just 100,000 laptops. And frankly, if I were Negroponte, I wouldn't count on that order until the money was in the bank, as countries have backed out of commitments in the past. And they've already reversed their previously strong stance against allowing Westerners to buy laptops for their own use. Negroponte has also changed his tune on his relationship with Microsoft. A year ago he crowed that "if I am annoying Microsoft and Intel then I figure I am doing something right." He also opined that "About 25 percent of the cost of a (Windows) laptop is there just to support XP, which is like a person that has gotten so fat that they use most of their muscle to move their fat." Now, however, he's touting his Microsoft ties, stating that "Microsoft has always been working on Windows for the XO. We put the SD (secure digital) slot into our laptop over one year ago, for them." He didn't elaborate on whether the SD slot was needed because of XP's feature bloat. The OLPC project may yet help a lot of poor children, but so far its record has been pretty underwhelming.

I'll admit it. I've never quite understood the rationale behind the $100 laptop (or OLPC or whatever it's being called these days). Yes, it's a noble goal to get technology into the hands of people around the world with the hope that they can do something productive with it -- but a big top down attempt to build something without much actual user feedback seems destined to fail. At the same time, we've noted that the market seems to be doing a pretty damn good job on its own of driving the price of computers down such that a special project may not make as much sense. So it's a bit amusing to now find out that while computer prices are dropping the price of the "$100 laptop" keeps rising. In fact, the price is now $200 per laptop, showing a rather rapid climb. The $100 laptop was never actually $100. Back in February, project backers said it would be $150. In April, they bumped the price up to $176. Just two weeks ago, they said it would be $188... and now it's $200. And we thought technology was supposed to drop in price over time. Perhaps if they'd acted more like a startup from the beginning things would be moving in the right direction.

The One Laptop Per Child project has been struggling to meet the lofty expectations it set for itself a couple of years ago. India decided not to participate in the program last year, and Nigeria and Brazil have apparently backed out of the program as well. A year ago they were expecting orders of five to ten million laptops; now they're struggling to reach 3 million orders. They're trying to jump-start things by offering Westerners a deal: buy a laptop for a third-world child and get one for your own use. It's a smart idea, and it's a shame they didn't try this strategy from the outset. The OLPC project is essentially a tech startup (albeit a non-profit one) and they might find more success if they acted more like other tech startups: first get the product in the hands of some real customers so you can get some real-world feedback. Only after you've learned how the product performs in the real world do you start worrying about producing them in volume. For example, there are plenty of schools here in the United States that might be interested in a $200 laptop. Few American kids experience the level of poverty experienced in Nigeria, but there are certainly kids here who don't have a computer at home. If they'd started out by selling a few thousand laptops to districts—or even individual schools—here in the United States, they could have demonstrated the product's usefulness in real classrooms and gotten feedback about how the product could be improved.