Mini Case 1.2: One Laptop per Child (p. 19 – 20)
In January 2005, Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and former Director of the MIT Media Lab,
founded the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) non-profit association. With the help of other MIT faculty
members as well as companies such as 3M, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Google, News Corporation,
Nortel, Red Hat and others, OLPC aims at designing, manufacturing and distributing laptops at a target
price of 100 US$. These laptops shall be sold to governments in developing countries and distributed
specifically by schools on the basis of one laptop per child. The idea is that the laptops are free to these
children. OLPC's objective is to produce a vital educational tool to transform the content and quality of
these children's education.
Considering that 60 per cent of the cost of a laptop resides in marketing, sales and distribution
which do not occur at OLPC, experts from both academia and industry have come together to provide
these ultra-low cost, flexible, power efficient, responsive and durable machines. As of 2007, initial
discussions have been held with countries such as Brazil, Thailand, India, Argentina and Egypt. Each
country will receive versions specific to their local language. OLPC has chosen Quanta Computer Inc. of
Taiwan as their original design manufacturer (ODM) for the $100 laptop project.
Manufacturing was scheduled to begin when 5 to 10 million machines have been ordered and
paid for in advance. As of the beginning of 2007, countries like Nigeria and Libya have each committed
to 1 million plus units. The preliminary schedule has been met, and in November 2006, the first 875 B1-
Test machines left the assembly line. In February 2007, the B2 Test machines were deployed to the
chosen launch countries: Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Libya and Thailand. To make them useful in their
environment, the laptops are equipped with devices to load their batteries manually. Their colour
display can be switched to a high resolution monochrome display that is easier to read in natural light.
However, things turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. As of May 2008, only some 100,000
units had been sold. The cost of the laptop is twice as high as planned.
Sources: dpa (2008); http://Laptop.org (2007a, 2007b, 2007c); OLPC Wiki (2007); Surowiecki (2007); TED
(2006).
