Monday, November 12, 2007

Fake Steve on OLPC

Fake Steve Jobs has some brutal (but sort of funny) articles about OLPC. Check this one, or google the site for "Negroponte".

GOGO gone?

I don't quite get this "limited time only" "give one get one" thing the OLPC people are running.

It's being spun as if I were giving the one I get to a child. But that is silly.

The child's interest will be piqued by the community aspect, and if there will be no XO systems for sale, it will be impossible to build the community. It's almost as if Bell had decided to start the phone system in Ougadougou (a real place with a real OLPC initiative, actually, but I like the name) and had financed it by selling telephones in America.

You know, one telephone isn't worth much. You need at least two.

So in practice it will almost certainly be "give two get two" program, with adult hobbyists buying. Or did I miss something?

Will there be a commercial XO product in the marketplace? If not, why not?

Is the platform stable enough to start thinking about end user apps? I don't realistically have the time to do systems work, but I'm very interested in what runs on it.