contributed articles

DOi: 10.1145/1516046.1516063

The vision is being overwhelmed by the reality
of business, politics, logistics, and competing
interests worldwide.
By kenneth L. kRaemeR, JasOn DeDRiCk, anD PRakuL shaRma
One Laptop
Per Child:
Vision vs.
Reality
at thE WorlD
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,

January 2005, Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the idea of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a $100 PC that would transform education for the world’s disadvantaged schoolchildren by giving them the means to teach themselves and each other. He estimated that up to 150 million of these laptops could be shipped annually by the end of 2007.⁴ With $20 million in startup investment, sponsorships and partnerships with major IT industry players, and interest from developing countries, the nonprofit OLPC project generated excitement among international leaders and the world media. Yet as of June 2009 only a few hundred thousand laptops have been distributed (they were first available in 2007), and OLPC has been forced to dramatically scale back its ambitions.

Although some developing countries are indeed deploying OLPC laptops, others have cancelled planned deployments or are waiting on the results of pilot projects before deciding whether to acquire them in numbers. Meanwhile, the OLPC organization ( www.olpc.com/) struggles with key staff defections, budget cuts, and ideological disillusionment, as it appears to some that the educational mission has given way to just getting laptops out the door. In addition, low-cost commercial netbooks from Acer, Asus, Hewlett-Packard, and other PC vendors have been launched with great early success.

So rather than distributing millions of laptops to poor children itself, OLPC has motivated the PC industry to develop lower-cost, education-oriented PCs, providing developing countries with low-cost computing options directly in competition with OLPC’s own innovation. In that sense, OLPC’s apparent failure may be a step toward broader success in providing a new tool for children in developing countries. However, it is also clear that the PC industry cannot profitably reach millions of the poorest children, so the OLPC objectives might never be achieved through the commercial market alone.

Here, we review and analyze the OLPC experience, focusing on the two most important issues: the successes and failures of OLPC in understanding and adapting to the developing-country environment and the unexpectedly aggressive reaction by the PC industry, including superpowers Intel and Microsoft, to defeat or co-opt the OLPC effort.

OLPC created a novel technology, the XO laptop, developed with close attention to the needs of students in poor rural areas. Yet it failed to anticipate the social and institutional problems that could arise in trying to diffuse that innovation in the developing-country context. In addition, OLPC has been stymied by underestimating the aggressive reaction of the PC industry to the perceived threat of a $100 laptop

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