The One Laptop Per Child project announced Wednesday that it plans to downsize half of its staff and reduce the salary of the remaining employees. OLPC will also halt its development of the open source Sugar environment and focus on building its next-generation hardware device. These plans are part of a major restructuring effort that has been necessitated by the financial downturn and the organization’s dwindling resources.
Is this anything like “Fantastic Voyage” and “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”? Or is it more of a “Weight Watchers” thing?
Edited 2009-01-08 02:09 UTC
More of a Dilbert thing.
I thought it had more to do with the device being super expensive and generally lackluster when compared to everything else available.
Had they just played ball, and sold it in the states for $199 though could have sold a boatload IMHO. Nope, Only way to get one was to pay double.
Sell them by mail order to anyone for $199 each. This will create volume pricing advantages.
Hint: Never put an academic in charge of a business (unless you want it to fail)!
Rest in peace, one paycheck per worker.
I’d love to blame this on big bad Microsoft and Intel (they certainly weren’t helpful), but unfortunately the OLPC was yet another rudderless project with people who didn’t have the courage of their convictions. Sugar was a disaster right from the start and was a huge turn off for the machines to most. They should have went into the open source world and creatively looked at what was available ;-).
As much as I admire Negroponte (still have my copy of Being Digital around somewhere), I have to agree. Although I expect the OLPC project probably deserves some credit for the current “netbook” phenomenon.