Both Fake Steve Jobs and Real Om Malik are writing about Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative in the wake of a Wall Street Journal article about the newly launched device.
If you haven’t heard Nicholas Negroponte’s TED Talks presentation about the OLPC now, I would really urge you to take a few minutes to check it out as it’s a high point in the mix of social responsibility, technological progress and economics.
What really stuck in my mind from the presentation was: “What is failure?” and that it is not so much about shipping umpteen million of these devices, but about changing the process of how it is done and the attention that is paid to the 80% (my wildly unsourced, made up on the spot figure) of the world that doesn’t currently have a computer.
Is it a “failure” if the laptops are $145 a piece at launch?
Is it a “failure” if they ship 3 months behind schedule?
Is it a “failure” if they draw so much attention to these problems that other larger organizations step in to try to offer similar services?
WHAT TO DO NOW?