By Jimmy Guterman

The way citizens are dismissing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project that week reminds me of how society were treating Hillary Clinton during the five days amoung her Iowa defeat and her New Hampshire comeback. To many observers, the inevitable has become the catastrophe in record date.

Some of the anti-OLPC notes that have arised since Intel was kicked out of the project have been well-reasoned (read the Economist’s near-obituary and Nikolaj Nyholm on Radar) — but much of the anti-OLPC opining has deteriorated to personal attack on OLPC head Nicholas Negroponte. At least one of those sources of attack has turned out to be run by an Intel employee. There are plenty of forces that want OLPC to fail commercially. And, for a variety of reasons, it might.

But what does “fail” mean in the market

OLPC is trying to serve? Regardless of whether it’s the XO laptop, Intel’s Classmate, Pixel Qi, or some other endeavor, it’s now far more likely that ultra-low-cost PCs are going to be made available in quantity for a developing world that needs them. (It needs clean water and vaccines more, of course, but it needs inexpensive and efficient IT as well.) And, most fundamental, even whether the XO laptop fails in the marketplace, none of that activity — commercial and otherwise — would have happened without the breakthrough OLPC project to start it.

P.S. To learn more about the XO laptop’s technology, I recommend this post from “Bunnie” Huang. To understand an unexpected example of its utility, see Mike Hendrickson, here on Radar.

Orginal post by Jimmy Guterman