OLPC struggles with Give 1, Get 1

THE OLPC PROJECT, Nicholas Negroponte's plan for cybernoid world domination, seems to be rolling a little slower than its founder would like. To spur things forward, a new 'Give 1, Get 1' programme is being rolled out in November to allow average consumers to get their hands on the famed OLPC laptop.

For $399, buyers will be able to get one laptop for themselves, and donate one to a child in a developing nation.

The deal doesn't represent particularly good value - at $100, the laptop is a steal. At $188, its current pricing to nations, it's good value but obviously more expensive. At $399, you can practically just call up Dell and get a capable Windows machine. So why buy OLPC?

Project-watchers have suggested that the new initiative, which is rolling out in November, is a way to scale up orders of the machine, thus bringing bulk prices down. But one would expect that the orders this is likely to generate would be a small number compared with the millions being bought by nations around the world.

Unfortunately, it seems that these nations haven't been quite so enthusiastic as we had previously been led to believe, and that smaller, test orders are being placed rather than massive epoch-defining ones.

Thus, the project rolls forward. Slowly. µ

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