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I have been a big fan of Nicholas Negroponte for many years now. I followed his visionary work at MIT Designs and then his attempts to bring his philosophies and talents to the world beyond academia and the digiteria. I have immense respect for his ability to see technology as a force for good and his tireless drive to not only make the world a better place but to help us all envision it with him. Sure he has had as many colossal failures as he had successes, but he is one of the few giants in technology and design that has always worked for the common good above lucre and better, he never gives up. Each setback just makes his next idea further outside the box, more grandiose and wide-ranging, more idealistic. The world needs more people like him, willing to run where venture capitalists fear to tread.

Mr. Negroponte was at TED this weekend (for the first time in three years) giving an update on his controversial OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. During his talk, he made the loaded statement that the current Netbook craze was started by his desire to produce a cheap, reliable laptop for the children of the third world. When you look at the timing of the original OLPC drive and the appearance of the Asus Eee, it is very clear he is right. The Eee was originally supposed to be a simple notebook for kids and other people who couldn’t afford or use a full-price laptop’…clearly taking a page from the OLPC’s mission statement. When the Netbook became the darling of the tech-set all that high mindedness changed, but it was ORIGINALLY meant to be an educational tool, not a notebook replacement. Now, Mr. Negroponte says Netbooks account for 50 percent of the laptop market, or soon will.

So how does he REALLY feel about Netbooks taking the OLPC concept and making a small fortune from it? According to Mr. Negroponte:

They didn’t copy the right things from us, but they exist.

He decried the fact that the commercial Netbooks are all profit driven, having none of the altruism that was part of the original OLPC and announced his plan to combat that with the next generation of OLPC products. Following the moves by such companies as VIA, the next OLPC will be released as an open source reference design, to be produced and possibly improved upon by any number of companies.

This seems to me a smart move, as it will free the entire OLPC movement from lingering suspicions that Negroponte was out to find some way to cash into it. Also, it may make up for one of the major deficiencies of Negroponte’s stewardship…poor execution. This will be especially true if the dual touchscreen concept that has been floated around actually becomes the new OLPC. That is a design that will take supply chain muscle to bring into being at a price still suited to the third world. Negroponte is a thinker and a visionary, not a manufacturer. Time to leave the nuts and bolts to the professionals and see what he can do about making the OLPC design bulletproof and saving the world, in that order.

(Source – Ethan Zuckerman)

Zealot (444 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).