101–110 of 211 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are actually selling the toys, yes.
But that's still ambiguous. It refers to all the products as toys. So is it actually selling the original hardware, like the Jibo, for $40? Do they "work" in any way? Does the OLPC turn on?
Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup? It was always a nonprofit, so of course it didn't make money. While the technology was lacking in many respects, it did serve a lot of children at the time, and proved the market that Chromebooks came to later dominate with a similar approach (linux-based OS with minimal resources at $100-300 price point).
Seems prudent to point out this isn't the product of a disgruntled's weekend project with fancy webdesign. This is a product from MSCHF which is a $100M+ startup [1] (feels like they're getting a bit of an astroturfed free ride of prime PR on HN because folks may not realize who is behind this) [1] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/279769-42
Is it astroturf, though? I think this is genuinely hilarious. Elizabeth Holmes as the patron saint of the website is the cherry on top.
They could add the CueCat to their list. I seem to remember that Wired got all excited about it at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
http://zteo.com/posts/sunday-hacking-cuecat-delicious-librar...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup? I'd say it kind of did (as did Netbooks as a technology for the most part as well). It's smartphones really that won the segment that OLPC was primarily targeted at. Chromebooks became fairly big in education but primarily AFAIK in developed countries.
If it, and netbooks as a hardware category, failed, it was because in the end they turned out to not have been worth it. I used a netbook happily for about a year or two, it cost ~$400 if I recall correctly, and afterwards I donated it to my sister who I think used it for a while as well. That's at least $150/yr for a low end product fun but uncomfortable product. After the netbook I upgraded to a Macbook Pro that wa…
if you earn $250 a month in a developing country, $1250 is like 9-month pay (* calculation may be wrong --- gotta sleep?)
One hopes there is some dignity to be found in the discovery that, if nothing else, your purpose was to be an example to others. The OLPC thing is a useful lesson in product design though. It wasn't really a product, it was a mandate about what some people thought others should do, and now instead we have netbooks, the android ecosystem, tablets, and everything else. If someone in the world wants a laptop over other…
Ha!
I know it's a joke, but a bit harsh it says OLPC achieved nothing.