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Is „one laptop per child“ really as bad as the other vaporware/fraudware in the list?
1. Products which failed because they were targeting their niche poorly (e.g. Juicero, OLPC)
2. Products which failed because they were outright scams (e.g. Theranos, Coolest)
However, I do think the failure of OLPC is still interesting enough to deserve a mention on this list. With OLPC in particular they were trying to be like three different things all at once and they succeeded at none of them.
- OLPC wanted to sell computers to the educational market, so they were selling lots of cheap machines to schools. This is actually not a bad business model; Google and Apple today have basically cornered that market with Chromebooks and iPads. Had OLPC succeeded, we could have had schools covered in cheap XO-1s instead. However...
- OLPC wanted to be a philanthropic mission to the third world, so they were designing the laptop with all sorts of weird features that only made sense for that market. Some of them are reasonable, like they actually intended it to be ruggedized and easy to repair. But they also had some weird features - like, it was designed around being able to mesh-network an entire village together with them. And at one point they were even going to have a handcrank on the thing so you could charge the laptop by hand if necessary. All of these features are unnecessary if you're just selling laptops to schools and they ultimately wound up getting dropped.
- OLPC also was built around it's founder's pet theories about constructionist learning. If you don't know what that means, well, then you're probably not a Hacker News user; because constructonism is how most techies learn a new system. We play around with it. The laptop was designed around a Linux-based UI called Sugar and was specifically intended to push Free Software onto the third world. The idea was that kids could learn how the computer actually worked by modifying the software onboard. It even had a view source button on the keyboard! All of that is catnip to people like us and completely useless for educators.
Ultimately they wound up delivering a very weird product that didn't actually do the thing it promised to do. That's very much in the spirit of a failed startup.
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).
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.
Damn, this web design is stunningly gorgeous work in service to a stunningly dumb joke.
Did you press 'F' to pay your respects though?
There's an inscription in the marble below the list of products that implores you to pay your respects to capitalism.
It it actually selling something? It takes me to a shopify link...
I'm usually a fan of MSCHF's parodies, but it's a bit disappointing to see reflexive tech-hate using the usual examples, Theranos and Juicero, on the HN homepage. It's not kind or curious. It's just a bit boring.
Is „one laptop per child“ really as bad as the other vaporware/fraudware in the list?
Not necessarily. The list is actually two different categories mixed together: 1. Products which failed because they were targeting their niche poorly (e.g. Juicero, OLPC) 2. Products which failed because they were outright scams (e.g. Theranos, Coolest) However, I do think the failure of OLPC is still interesting enough to deserve a mention on this list. With OLPC in particular they were trying to be like three diff…
It it actually selling something? It takes me to a shopify link...