by Cyrus Farivar
It’s been nearly two years since MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte revealed his ambitious plan to provide kids in developing countries with $100 laptops. Today, the One Laptop per Child foundation has announced that its cheapo device (now officially dubbed the “XO laptop”) will be made available to the American and Canadian consumer market for a two-week period in November. For $400, you can participate in the “Give One, Get One” program—your purchase gets you one laptop for yourself and another that will be sent to a student in the developing world.
This announcement is a fundamental shift for the project, and it’s the latest signal that the $100 laptop project will never work as it’s been conceived. In 2005, the OLPC team stipulated that only governments could buy the devices and that each country had to buy a minimum quantity of 1 million laptops. Not a single nation went for the deal, so earlier this year, OLPC reduced the minimum buying quantity to 250,000. More recently, that minimum quantity has dropped to 100,000. How many countries have signed up now? Still zero.
