OLPC struggles to realize ambitious vision

Earlier this year, Negroponte publicly said that Intel's Classmate efforts hurt his project, given the well-funded nature of the chipmaker's initiative. The two organizations buried the hatchet by signing a collaboration agreement that put Intel on OLPC's board, but Intel continued to distribute its Classmate PCs through its for-profit "World Ahead" effort.

Meanwhile, as the cost of the XO have increased, companies such as Asus and Everex have developed competitive low-cost PCs, which governments may also find attractive as XO alternatives.

"OLPC did not fully appreciate the adoption barriers when they targeted government agencies as their principal target audience," Quelch said. The government procurement processes are complex, and there is a trade-off between investments in teachers and technology by governments, which OLPC didn't realize, Quelch said.

Even U.S. customers that purchased laptops through theGive 1 Get 1program have grumbled, with OLPC providing little or no communication about laptops -- either the ones they donated or the ones shipped to them. "XO laptops just appear on doorsteps without even an e-mail to tell us when or how they will arrive." said Wayan Vota, an OLPC observer and donor who runs the Web siteOLPC News. "OLPC is lucky we are so committed to their cause -- we sure wouldn't put up with this treatment from Apple or Dell."

If OLPC had issues distributing laptops in a developed country such as the U.S., it doesn't bode well for XO distribution in developing countries, Vota said. Officials from Brightstar, the distributor of XO laptops for OLPC, were unavailable for comment.

Despite OLPC's identity as a nonprofit educational organization, its focus has been predominantly on the hardware it has pioneered, said Anders Mogensen, co-founder of Seismonaut, which carried out an assessment of an OLPC pilot project in a government-run primary school in Abuja, Nigeria, for the Danish government. "If OLPC is about education, the focus should be around the activity and education results. So far the conversation has been around the hardware and technology," Mogensen said.

OLPC's casual approach to matching its offering to Nigeria's educational agenda is causing it to lose ground against Intel, which has successfully integrated its Classmate PCs in secondary schools, Mogensen said. Nigeria follows a strict curriculum for students based on specific study material, and Intel is working with the government and schools to integrate Classmate PCs into curricula. OLPC has yet to clarify its plans to support curricula, Mogensen said.

OLPC in Nigeria is primarily involved in promoting the idea of the laptop rather than working with the government to develop a structure to implement the curricula, Mogensen said.

Until OLPC improves its teacher-training infrastructure, it could face barriers in countries such as Nigeria, where a rigid education system puts teachers in full command over students. "The teacher loses authority when kids in primary school know more about PCs than they do," Mogensen said. That is unacceptable in Nigeria, he said.

OLPC needs to have a stronger program to help teachers adapt to alternative teaching methodologies, said Novica Nakov, president of Free Software Macedonia, who evaluated a classroom that incorporated OLPC's XO laptops.

The organization may also be out of touch with localization issues that, left unaddressed, could discourage broad adoption. For example, despite the fact that Macedonian uses Cyrillic characters, the XO laptops supplied to the classroom used Latin-character keyboards, Nakov said.

The OLPC pilot in Macedonia, being conducted by United Nations Development Program, comes in the face of the government ordering 180,000 NComputing thin clients for classrooms. OLPC may be an innovative computer, but it will be difficult to convince politicians to spend more money on computers, Nakov said.