Perhaps OLPC will goad others into making great tablet PCs as well.

Netbooks are a result of a boom/bust cycle in Taiwan and Shenzen.

Citations:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/what_was_the_first_netbook

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

OLPC may have had a slight effect, but the larger cause was the natural development of computing technology. As electronics advance prices drop at a fairly predictable rate. What cost $100 this year is probably going to cost $50 next year, and $25 the year after that.

That is the real reason why laptops have gotten so cheap, not because of anything the OLPC foundation has done.

But until somebody in the industry breaks from the pack and says "I'm going to offer this cheaply, damn the profits", all that cost savings accrues in profits to the OEMs. That maverick could be an upstart startup intent on market share with nothing to lose. Or it could be a nonprofit director on a mission to save the 3rd world.

In this case, the OLPC was the catalyst. The technology existed beforehand, and most people knew the technology existed. But Nicholas Negroponte was the first one to say "It can be done, therefore let's do it."

The same structure exists in lots of other industries. Why is broadband 10x faster in Japan than here (citation: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/bro...)? They have the same technology. But the telecom industry in the U.S. is a duopoly between Comcast and Verizon (with a few bit players), and they have an incentive to dribble out only enough in speed increases to stay ahead of their competitor.

Perfectly competitive markets exist only in an economics textbook. In the real world, things don't happen until somebody says "We're going to make it happen."

...or the manufacturers concentrate on bringing the features of $1500 laptops into the next generation of $1000 laptops, instead of bringing the features of $1000 laptops into a new generation of $750 laptops.

* Manufacturers were using the lower cost electronics to add more features at the same price point rather than lowering their price point. The OLPC definitely shook that up.

* The OLPC led the way using linux for the underlying OS, which led to the first netbooks using linux. This really shook up Microsoft, resulting in them offering deeply discounted copies of WinXP to netbook manufacturers to recapture that market ($15? vs. $50++? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook#Windows, http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/19/ms.asks.15.for...).

With respect to the last bullet, the OLPC drove down software prices as much as Moore's Law drove down hardware prices.

People used to call me all the time, "I can't find a laptop under $1,000, help! What should I buy? Should I just get a desktop for $700? I can use the same monitor."

Now, my next portable is going to cost $100. It might be a tablet. Not too long from now, they're going to be in refrigerator magnets for $5.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=728044

Inspiration counts for something.

My (rather limited) understanding of the PC industry is that it does / did try to maintain certain price points in the face of ongoing technical improvements. For a while, the area around US$1000 was maintained for lower end systems. That has since gone by the wayside.

Their latest deployment is in Rwanda, and although I will fully admit that I was chagrined to see OLPC still selling, once I watched some of the videos and did some reading it was clear that they are actually doing some real good.

See: http://www.informationweek.com/video/infrastructure/36557810...

There is something to be said for having a bright green laptop that isn't terribly useful for adults and doesn't run a standard OS. It makes them less of a target for theft or resale in poorer countries and keeps them in the hands of the people that need them, the students.

I think a lot of good is yet to come from OLPC, it is just taking a lot longer than they expected. I do however fully agree that the touchscreen vision is a joke.

You really don't need the courseware, at least not at the start. All you really need to start is the regular textbooks transcribed as e-books. The kid can then carry and access all their books, current and future, in one compact volume, breaking any limitation on the kid's reading. Since OLPSs have network connections, governments (and educational associations) can also spend some money translating relevant topics from wikipedia, creating better localized versions. Classroom activities can also be developed on top of the localized software that already ships with them.

It's also lovely to suppose that local people cannot fix the machine because "this intended market is illiterate". Living in a third world country, I am deeply offended. This is, however, a failure of the OLPC plan. The OLPC should also have been directed towards US schools in order to gain momentum, perhaps even before attempting to go after the third world.

It's also foolish to overpromise impossible hardware. XO-2 and XO-3 are ludicrous. XO-1.75 is great, however. I love the idea of Windows-proofing it by running on ARM. I fail to see the educational value of running MS Ofice.

But it's absolutely unfair to expect the OLPC folks to develop courseware for the machine beyond the outstanding materials already there.

* Yes, I know people / companies would not have donated the same amount of $ for a non-sexy cause.

The areas for which it was intended did not need mosquito nets - places such as rural Mexico. These places have power and running water.

While saving lives is a worthwhile goal, saving them just so they can carry on being perpetually dependent on foreign aid seems to be pretty unfair on both the nations giving aid and the nations receiving it.

This is an example of a radical opinion that one might expect to be downvoted for disagreement here on HN, but I see (from current net upvotes) that others agree, or at least think the comment contributes to the discussion here. I'll expand on this a bit, from my perspective as a parent of wealthy-country children who have long had access to computers. Of course I grew up without ready computer access. Children having personal computers with online access is, like most of human life, a TRADE-OFF. I think computers are wonderful tools and helpful for self-directed learning, but they are also enormous time sinks and distractions from books and many hands-on activities. Current research doesn't unambiguously show that computer use contrasted with nonuse is even an advantage for learning K-12 academic subjects. (Some studies appear to show academic achievement going down as computer use goes up in developed countries.) The role of easy telecommunications in fostering economic development seems beyond dispute, but voice telephony and an efficient postal system for adults may go most of the way to providing that benefit, without all children needing an Internet-connected laptop.

I have lived in poor countries, which is why I am conscious that where money is scarce, one must think about what way of spending money produces the best results. The OLPC project certainly had noble goals, and strove to be inexpensive, but perhaps the countries the project intended to serve need something else more urgently.

If those people had been afforded opportunities similar to those available in the US their total salaries would be somewhere between $20 and $40 trillion.

That's a huge amount of wasted potential - all those resources could be working on making all of our lives better - advancing medicine, computer science, engineering and other things. Instead they are living miserable lives in atrocious slums.

Perhaps, but affording those people opportunities similar to those available in the United States might cost a great deal of money, and might also involve controversial steps such as overthrowing corrupt governments and promoting English rather than local languages as a language of school instruction. Poor countries (I have lived in them) are interacting systems of climate, natural resource base, cultural tradition, existing economic level, existing level of education, international trade patterns, political system, and other influences, and thus poor countries don't change overnight.

You can't wait for perfection - you have to get started with what's practical now and iterate. Equal opportunity for all is the long term goal, not something you should expect tomorrow.

Fortunately whatever else the OLPC project did, it inspired the Eee and that inspired a whole generation of low power, cheap devices which are (more) affordable for everyone. That may not be the step they expected, but it's one in the right direction!

PixelQi.com (spinoff from former CTO of OLPC) has developed a high-resolution LCD technology that will compete with e-Ink; since it uses mainstream LCD manufacturing the economies of scale will mean it will be much cheaper to produce an 11" e-reader.

Assuming PixelQI succeeds, this means even more e-readers for less money, and and an increase in whatever you perceive the benefits of e-readers to be (such as less paper waste, or better use of time).

The Sugar project http://www.sugarlabs.org/ is the software side of OLPC, able to be run from USB sticks on any old PC you have lying around; a P3-700 or higher is still pretty snappy. I know of several test implementations using it, for real, in schools (there are still bugs to work out until it can be deployed widely).

Based all my teacher and parent friends, all the increased access to computers here hasn't really improved education much. And we're buying expensive commercial educational software, not just Sugar or gCompris.

Maybe the time and money is better spent funding CC / public domain textbooks? That and Sugar are what I'm more interested in supporting.

OLPC was a big ambition and, like most new initiatives, was probably bound to fail initially. However, he had an idea and he did it! The great success is that future initiatives will have the opportunity to learn and improve upon it.

Are there other things that need fixing around the world? Yes, but the argument that we cannot do anything grand until every single primitive human need is solved is bunk. Innovation does not need to wait for a utopia.

And if you don't ask this question first, your well-intended project to 'gift the poor' becomes 'abetting the criminals'. Examples: FM. Television. Someone will fill the vacuum.

I maintain that there's a huge, untapped market for ed. software. Wikipedia is a powerful clue ... and, now, a free resource. But education's a lot more than shoveling data.