One Laptop Per Child Talks

On Thursday, April 26, One Laptop Per Child held a three-hour analyst meeting at their headquarters in Cambridge, MA. The OLPC Leadership spoke on several key aspects of the Children's Machine XO architecture and the program's overall production strategy.

OLPC Talks received exclusive audio tapes of the meeting, transcribed below. Please reference OLPC Talks if you use any quotes or information from the transcripts.

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Nicholas Negroponte, President, One Laptop Per Child: We have had, at the last count, 25 countries. Is it about 25? There have been latecomers surprise us. And they were divided into families Monday, which are the 7 countries working with us since the beginning, and then sort of what we have arrogantly called the "accession countries" to the EU coming here on Tuesday, and then they've been together on Wednesday and this morning and some of them are staying, so we had a very intense week.

The reason we're doing this meeting is that we did not anticipate changing the industry. That was not our purpose, to launch "One Laptop Per Child" in order to change the way people thought of computers or the way people develop software, or push one particular direction versus another. But clearly the project has had a pretty big influence on the industry.

The fact that MSFT dropped Windows [$3...?] a few days ago is actually very intimately related to OLPC. And since we had not ever talked to analysts in an organized way, and we have seen some people making statements in the community that are just wrong, we figured we would devote the time mostly to Q&A. There's so much press on this project, we almost don't have to initiate [noise] heard about it. So what I'm going to do is not take an hour at all. I'm going to march through very quickly some of the introductory remarks that I normally bank in about 15 minutes, and then really use as much time as possible for Q&A.

And there's our opening slide, I guess. Excuse me for talking to the side, but I don't want to have that light in my face. One Laptop Per Child, as a *concept* really goes back to 1968, when a professor named Seymour Packard made a very simple observation, and was that children learned learning when they were involved with computer programming, that it was actually the closest that a child could come to thinking about thinking, when he wrote a program to do something he learned about that something in a more fundamental way, and then when the program didn't work, then you debug it and the process of debugging was a very fundamental way of thinking about thinking, and this sounds very abstract.

Seymour invented Logo; he did work here, I shouldn't say here, across the street at MIT, for all the years that followed, and when the Media Lab was founded, education pieces in the Learning Research Group always represented about 20% of the lab's budget. So sometimes people say, "Oh when did you get the idea of a $100 laptop, the answer just goes back a long time, and in fact Seymour and I were involved with putting computers in primary schools in Senegal, outside of Dakar, and in Colombia and Pakistan back in 1982. So this is not a project that just started last week, and during the 1990's a lot of people in the Media Lab were involved with concepts that today are called WiFi and WiMax, but to bring out to very remote rural places... telecommunications so that you could connect kids, kids that were remote, kids that were poor, could have access.

In fact if you go to that slide, we're all into this by different things; I was... this is one of the projects I was interested in, influenced by (let's see if we can do it that way.) In the late '90's, in fact if you can see the slide it says 1999 up here, the person who was the Media Lab's representative in Asia was a friend of [King Sheluks... sp?] and one thing led to the next and he started to build schools and some people in this room I think... David, do you know [Bernie Krisher... sp?]

He was actually a journalist for many years and... Bernie started a project where he was building schools and I volunteered to be the first person to donate a school and this was in Cambodia, in a village that has an income of... the average income in that village is $47/year. No electricity, no telephone, no television. There are now five villages that have schools like this, and two of them don't even have a road, and again, fate always plays... you know chance plays a role; in this particular case my son was living in Italy at the time, had girlfriend problems, had a startup company that didn't work, and I said to him, "You know, if you can suffer the indignity of working for your father, why don't you go to Cambodia and connect the school?" And he did!

And then [unclear name] was his friend; he wasn't prime minister yet, gave us the satellite connection; I sent some laptops up to the school that I bought on eBay, and one thing led to the next, and in early 2002 this village that had no electricity; the kids were taking laptops home; their first English word was "Google", okay... their parents loved it because it was the brightest light source in the house!

And so some of those things, those stories, they make headlines, but it also was pretty fundamental. These kids were doing things that... so I asked myself, could we actually do this on a much larger scale? In parallel, Seymour Packard in this country persuaded, or was very much involved with, the State of Maine doing OLPC, and did about 40 thouand units, and there seemed to be sort of a growing movement, and I looked at this situation and said if we scale it, what is the part that is the show-stopper? And the telecommunications piece in my opinion is not the show-stopper, because first of all it's the last thing.

If I can get 2 Mb into this village, whether a hundred kids use it or 50 kids or 150 kids, it almost doesn't matter. Yes you have some significant response time, but it's kind of the last thing. But if you believe in the concept of OLPC, the damn laptop was the problem. And it was the problem not only because it's not elastic; if there are 100 kids you need 100 laptops; 20 kids arrive the next day you need 20 more laptops, and so on and so forth, but being part of the electronics industry, and in full disclosure I'm on the Motorola board, so I see it from the cell phone point of view as well as the laptop point of view, what happens is the price of the electronics drops, in rough numbers, 50% every 18 months, and so what you do at any of these companies, including Motorola, is you add features to your cell phones and compensate for that.

So even if the base electronics costs less 18 months from now, there's enough new features that the consumer will at least pay as much as they did last time, maybe even a little more, which on the one hand is great because you get innovation; you're going to get better services, etc. But on the other hand, at least in the case of laptops, you end up with a bit of bloat after a while, because you add more processing power, then you put in more... and suddenly... I don't know about you, but my laptop, and I haven't had the intelligence like some of you to graduate to Apple, to go back to Apple; maybe I should, but my laptop has never been less reliable, has never been slower in my life.

I mean mine crashes three or four times per day, and you know I get tired of this little sign that says, "Do you want to tell Microsoft about it?", and you know I get it four times, and I've even asked them! I said, "Does it really help if I say yes, click yes?", and they claim it does, but what's happening is that the 'obesity', it's like an SUV, that you're using most of your petrol to move the weight of the SUV, so... completely rethink the laptop from the bottom up, from the, from a [noise]..-centric point of view, and cut out the things..[noise].. that we thought were necessary.

And so that's why OLPC was born, and this is what we did. We created the non-profit, and I think that's important maybe, we'll see what your questions are, but the non-profit... the *reason* to be a non-profit is clarity of purpose. It's really very important. By being a non-profit, you can go to, let's say a head of state, you can talk about 'mission', versus the market. This is really critical, and in fact what I argue with Intel and others publicly, as well as privately, I say, "Guys (they usually are guys), you view children as a market, and we view children as a mission. And it's just a fundamental difference. You have a shareholder responsibility; you have a fiduciary responsibility that in fact if you don't meet it, and I'm on your board, then it's my responsibility to kick you out." So you just can't... your behavior is different. And so we made it a non-profit and it's, I think, the best decision we've made.

And we also went to scale, and I'm always fond of telling the same story you will hear from our display partner later, but when we started it I approached a display company, a different one, and said, "You know, we need your partnership in this, to make a small display. You know, that it's not necessarily that bright, maybe has even some... could have some pixel defects, and so on." And the CEO said, "You know Nicholas, our mission, our corporate strategy is to make large bright perfect-color displays, and so we just can't help you." And I said, "Well that's a shame because I need 100 million units a year." He said, "Welllll, maybe..." And so suddenly, as soon as the scale is big enough it changes corporate strategies, and it's... you know if there wasn't serous scale here, Intel wouldn't be waging such a war with OLPC. It's all about scale. The numbers, you'll see them... people talk about it later. These were estimates that we've actually stuck to recently, even though the slide is almost two years old, or a year and a half old; those numbers have stayed pretty consistent.

Next slide?... Oh, if we launch with Kofi Annan, you know we get a lot of press, but really it's the next slide... This is the machine we showed. David had it, this picture you had in Fortune magazine, bright and perfect timing, during the world summit of the Information Society in Tunis, and I looked back at it... we all thought it was perfect at the time... I looked back at it with a certain quaintness. It is absolutely invaluable! The project wouldn't have launched without this particular machine and this particular design, for a number of reasons, but the most important was the pencil-yellow crank. Walter chose the colors, and pencil-yellow was important, and it was the crank that just defined the machine as 'utterly absurd'!

I mean to put this crank on the side of the machine just doesn't work, so we've taken it off. We still have cranks, by the way, we chose to, but by being in the picture and attached to the machine, everybody remembered it. And this picture... I still meet people today who look at that machine and say, "Where's the crank?! You got rid of the crank!" No we haven't gotten rid of the crank, and then you point out that it's much more intelligent to have it connected with the AC adapter, and get your little baby brother to wind it up for you or whatever.

But this was invaluable. And it still wasn't believable. In November of 2005, it was charming, and in fact I'll tell you the story of why it's green and white later, but it's still... it was okay, it was kind of a folly, but nobody wanted to say that, but on December 12th of that year, something very fundamental happened, and that was that Quanta agreed to build it. When Quanta agreed to build the system, and in rough numbers they make 40% of all the world's laptops, the story changed. It wasn't *if* it was going to happen, but when and how much and so on.

So if we go to the next slide... you may have a slightly different one, but this is kind of my quick description and I put in bold the three things, and maybe rugged should be also in bold, that really your laptop doesn't even come close. The lowest power is important, and you'll hear a lot about that. The Wi-Fi connection is absolutely critical, naturally. And the dual-mode display. None of those three things are in any other laptop on the planet. Okay, so those are *real* differences, and when Bill Gates tells people, "Get a real computer", I look and I say, "No *real* laptop has those features."

And so it's very important because the two watts is, you can't if you're going to use human power, and go to places that don't have electricity at home, which is 50% of the kids in the world, you have to be in that range. So power management, Mary Lu's fond of saying, "Hitting $100 is easy; hitting less than two watts is hard." And you need that it will work outside, and so on. I think the next slide is the laptop itself, but you have it in front of you. You can just click through those, Mary Lu, just go through them quickly, until we get to the next text slide. Just keep going. I don't usually have laptops sitting around, so the next slide is, I think... no, one more... this picture normally doesn't mean much to people, but it means a lot to me. You took it, didn't you [name unclear].

Walter Bender: Yes, we got permission, actually.

Negroponte: You don't usually see pictures of the Quanta assembly line, okay. But these were the real laptops coming off, the first time around, with real people.

Mary Lou Jepsen: The very first ones. Literally the first ones.

Negroponte: These were *literally* the first ones? That's great; I didn't realize that. It might interest you... you may know all these things, but... that assembly line, in 23 minutes, can switch from making an Apple laptop to a Compaq laptop. And does that factory make all of them, or do they have a second factory at Quanta?

Mary Lou Jepsen: [faint audio] ... they switch to different buildings for different builds.

Negroponte: But it's really quite incredible, the assembly line, that they can switch them that fast, from making one to the other. Next slide I think is, oh! We have some of these you can look at after. This is just one of the power chargers. Are you going to talk about power?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yes.

Negroponte: Then we'll slip to the next slide. Also talk about the mesh network. It's this starts to get very country-specific. We do rural areas. We do a lot with satellites. If you're doing areas in some countries for example, Uruguay has a lot of DSL already at the schools, so you don't need this sort of thing, you just connect directly, and we'll talk about that later. Next slide?

Oh, why don't you skip these, because those are the ones you're going to talk about... go one more. These are, this is important. Alright, here all we're trying to show here is the same original school. What happens is you start to build your own networks, these villagers, and even if you have to sort of erect these things, to reach out... in this case it reaches out about 4 miles to the next school. You know they start building these things, and it's not as if you need Vodaphone to go in and sort of launch them. So even though BT is a very big launch party with us, particularly in Pakistan, a lot of this is done in the grass roots.

I think you go, a couple of slides. Walter will talk about this interface we use; it's called "SUGAR". We will run Windows. Windows will work on it, but you will see that we advocate a very different approach. I think you'll see it through those slides. Okay, so quickly, the economics that we've been using is just a little old-fashioned. We go to central governments, and get them to place single big orders. So we get a country... okay, if you do a million units, then three or four countries are enough to launch it; the supply chain starts. Will you describe some of the.. [noise].

Male Speaker 2: The concept is that Citibank and its worldwide operating uses its global institutional position in the world has offered their services to us pro bono, throughout the world. And what they do is have affiliate organizations, and institutions in each of the countries that we're dealing with, where they offer free letters of credit and services to facilitate each of the countries' ability to make a very smooth and seamless payment, plus supply chain.

It's done on a 3 to 5 day basis, so our supply chain passes those savings on to ultimately the country that then pays less money for each computer. So the whole financial background of this structure, instead of a treasury department and an organization of 30 to 50 people, is two people, and Citibank facilitating the entire payment structure and the entire letters of credit that are needed to make sure there's no question where the payments go and our supply chain, some of which you'll hear from shortly in the afternoon, are comfortable with this arrangement and our countries get a better price, ultimately.

Q1: Do they pay you, or Quanta, or everybody in this line...

Negroponte: The countries pay Citibank, and Citibank distributes it.

Male Speaker 2: ...to the supply chain, including Quanta of course, which is the manufacturer.

Q2: [inaudible question]

Negroponte: We get a dollar.

Male Speaker 2: We get a dollar for each computer to pay for the infrastructure. That's it. And the infrastructure is very small. You're looking at it...

Negroponte: I keep telling people that we're 1,500... 250 of them are in Taiwan... I think of it the other way, the open source community. But the truth is, it's a small office.

Q3: You use the dollar to pay...[inaudible]

Male Speaker 2: Actually, you're paying for that [laughter]

Negroponte: Just how much of it does Quanta get though? Quanta gets their cost plus 3%.

Male Speaker 2: And they get very attractive pricing, as do all of the supply chain providers, to participate in this program.

Q4: What is their cost?

Negroponte: I don't know what you mean... their cost of assembling, or the cost of the laptop?

Q4: What's their cost of assembling?

Mary Lou Jepsen: It's around $10. It's lower, actually [inaudible].

Negroponte: Put another way, if they get their cost plus 3%, they get $10.30 or whatever?

Male Speaker 2: In that range.

Q4: And then the cost of the whole laptop?

Negroponte: Let's make sure we're asking the same question. What we have asked companies to do, first and foremost, is to not lose money. We're not going to any company and saying, "Please, provide stuff at a loss." So, you could do it several ways. One is to say, "Figure out what your cost is in a totally transparent way, and take a nominal profit." Or, you know, figure it out the more traditional way, which includes everything from sort of looking at the volumes and predicting and doing all of that stuff. So, Quanta's profit, if you want to look at it that way, as a profit, last time I looked is $3 per laptop. That's probably a confidential number that just went out on the air, but it's small.

Q4: And how does that compare to what their profit [is] on a Compaq or an Apple?

Negroponte: [inaudible]

Q4: How much does one of these laptops cost?

Negroponte: At the moment the cost of manufacturing is $170.

Q4: And how much do the countries pay?

Negroponte: $175. $176 if you want to add the dollar. But it's very important to understand that the price of the laptop and the cost of the laptop are the same. In other words we don't... Usually, 50% of the cost of a laptop is sales, marketing and distribution and profit. And so, in our case it's not, because we don't have any those. We don't have sales, marketing, we've been looking. Distribution, governments do that. Profit, there isn't any, at least for us. So, we can make... you know, if it costs $175, then the country pays $176.

But most importantly is it's close. So if the cost of nickel goes down, right now we're using nickel/metal hydride batteries, so if the cost of nickel goes down, the price of the laptop goes down. So we readjust...[questions someone quietly]... every quarter we readjust the price. And our estimate is that naturally, without doing any technological changes it will go down 25% per year per year.

Q4: And you're saying that Citibank is going to be the one... the countries are going to pay Citibank and they're going to disburse it to everybody?

Negroponte: Yes.

Male Speaker 2: In fact they front the money for the letter of credit, is the way it works.

Q5: [noise]... the United States... [more noise]... and I've changed to maybe.

Negroponte: We can't ignore the United States. On the other hand, we're not up to design something for a totally different situation. So, we may do something in the United States, because we're being asked to do so much, and it's also a place that, if we do do it, you're going to have more kids making software, and more software emerging. There are reasons to go from 'no' to 'maybe'.

Countries paying for other countries is of great interest to us. Children funding each other... I mean there are just many things, the one that appeared in January, that accidentally got a lot of press, was the concept of paying for two and getting one. So, it could be commercially available. You buy them for $300, and when it's purchased you've funded a kid in Africa; the laptop has gone to another kid. It's a very attractive model. It's not the way to launch it; you can't trigger anything that way, but it's a very appealing approach, and we will certainly do it, but we're not going to do it tomorrow.

Q4: Can I just ask about the US? How quickly do you think you could be having, offering them in the US?

Negroponte: We could offer them as rapidly as the end of this year.

Q4: And at the OLPC prices, not at the commercial price?

Negroponte: It depends on which model you go to. It wouldn't make sense for us to deal with the United States, unless it increased the number of kids in developing countries getting laptops.

Q4: Well what about like in really poor places in the US, like Bridgeport Connecticut, or even parts of Massachusetts, where this project was developed?

Negroponte: Well you've got to be... you've got to think of it... let's take Massachusetts. We spend $10,000 per child per year in primary education. Even in those very poor school districts, you're spending, even if not $10,000, you're spending $7000, or $6000. You're spending pretty high numbers. When you're spending $6000 per year, whether the laptop costs $200 or $250, doesn't really make much difference. In a country that spends less than $200 per child per year on primary education, it makes a huge difference.

Q4: Ok, so you're saying you might charge $250 here.

Negroponte: You'd have to look at it differently, yes.

Q5: Didn't Mitt Romney commit to buying them in Massachusetts, as a publicity stunt? Because you're not saying that... before you always said 'no'. But I don't hear you saying 'no'. [laughter!]

Negroponte: First of all, let me tell you the story about that. You're absolutely right. Almost two years ago, it will be two years in July, Mitt Rom... one of... I forget his title at the time, but in Mitt Romney's office. What was his title?

Female Speaker 1: I think it was COO (?)

Negroponte: Oh, he was COO? Well, whatever he was... he asked if I would come and have lunch with Romney and tell him about One Laptop Per Child, which was merely an idea. And I dutifully did that, and then when I was here in September, we get this phone call saying, this is September 2005, we get this phone call saying, "Would you like to come up to the statehouse tomorrow when Governor Romney announces One Laptop Per Child for Massachusetts?" So we had our then industrial designers whip up overnight a model, and I arrived beautifully, thinking that I'm going to be like the flowers, you know, the decor, like a little sort of rubber plant at this whole thing. Instead, he puts me on stage, and says to the press corps, "We'll now hear from Professor Negroponte."

Which of course I was delighted to do; you push my button and I'll talk. And I did that. And afterwards, he said, "Well, we'll do it for all the kids in Massachusetts." That's what happened. Then as we started... after Quanta came onboard, after we started to do it, we said, "No, let's not do the United States." But 19 governors have asked us, and I just checked with her yesterday, have asked us to do it in their states. We've now been saying constantly 'no', so the gentleman who said we changed our minds is correct. But on the othe hand, we're changing our mind again. And we're going back to 'maybe', and we're looking at it very seriously, as we talk. I mean, we're looking at it right now.

Q4: You said 19 governors?

Negroponte: 19 governors. We can show you the letters.

Q4: And how much are they willing to pay on average?

Negroponte: Again, we never got that far.

Q4: Right.

Male Speaker 2: ...The State of Massachusetts is funding two schools' one-to-one laptop programs, one I believe is [inaudible] the other's in Worchester. They've just started; they're middle school programs, so the idea is beginning to take off... [inaudible]

Q4: So were these governors typically asking for these for all children in their states, or just the poorest children? What's the situation?

Negroponte: I don't... I think that most of them haven't gone that far. The first time it happened to me, I got email that said, "I'd like to buy a [?] for my state, signed Jeb. I said, "This can't be real!" At the time, John, my older brother, was Director of National Intelligence. I said, "Is this real?" It was real. So I apologized to to Jeb; I said, "I apologize to the governor; I thought maybe this was spam." [laughter]

We had a conversation where I went down to see him, and he actually came up and met with Walter twice. And he was very interested for the whole state, but we were... this was a year and a half ago, so it just hasn't... you know, interestingly enough, I don't know, we should find out from Lindsay how, almost a more interesting question is how many of those governors' letters are in the past two months? And I should find out. Maybe zero.

Male Speaker 2: I think you'll find there's a cost issue, there's also a resource issue I've seen in my own school district. The cost of having a lab full of Dells even running on small boxes, the IP administrative training, support, all those other costs are getting to be prohibitive. That's why I think schools are reacting to that as well. Pretty ugly.

Negroponte: It's also in those models, the computer lab model, there is no ownership of the laptops; it's government property... after three months they need repair. And these, the children treat them very differently. They polish them... the experience we had in Cambodia was the little boys get their sisters to make bags for them. They sleep beside them! Kids that I know, for instance in that picture, sleep with their laptop. I mean, they're not going to let these break, and Mary Lu's done a heck of a job in making them very repairable, so that 95% of the maintenance is done by the kids, actually.

Q5: How difficult do you think it's going to be to reverse-engineer the laptop once it's out in the open? To reverse-engineer the process of building them.

Negroponte: let's turn off the projector...

Male Speaker 2: She asked were we worried about people reverse-engineering the laptop, reverse-engineering the process.

Q5: No I didn't say 'worried'. I'm wondering... if so many state governments are interested... [much noise] ... what kind of changes are you expecting? Are others going to build a similar project for $300 per unit tomorrow then?

Negroponte: Well, we hope they do. In fact, the more people that do it, the better. In fact, as far as humanly possible, we will make everything open-source, as much of the hardware as we can. We can't make AMD's processor open source.

Q4: Presumably no one will be able to match your price.

Negroponte: By definition they can't match it unless they're a non-profit. Remember what our purpose is: our purpose is to get laptops into the hands of children, particularly the poorest and remote, most remote, children. So, usually the people who are going to reverse-engineer it, in the worst sense of that, whatever it means, are going to do it for profit in other places.

Q5: So there was some irony in the question.

Negroponte: Yes there is.

Q5: The question is, and you answered it, do you expect others to do the same? And the followup question is how do you get this changed? [inaudible]

Negroponte: Well, I think what is putting this downward pressure on the industry is pushing people in a direction that you don't naturally want to go. And I think that's the change that we're inducing. Now there are othe technical changes... I can't claim that it's because of us that the industry has become power-conscious. It's not because of us that mesh networks have become popular, or because of us that dual-mode displays will exist, but boy we play a role in all of those, and I think that's very important.

Q4: Could you elaborate about the dual-mode display?

Negroponte: You'll hear a lot about it from Mary Lu. It's a display that works both in the sunlight, and with backlight.

Q4: Ok, so it doesn't refer to [inaudible].

Negroponte: No. Dual mode is either back-lit or front-lit.

Q4: Do you think Microsoft's [inaudible] software... [inaudible]

Negroponte: Unequivocally, yes.

Q6: Are they going to win with that?

Negroponte: I don't use the word 'competitive' very much, but I think it's a very bold move, and I think it's an important move. You'll hear a lot from Walter and from others about open source not just being free software in the sense of cost-free, but being an approach to learning and sharing that's pretty intrinsic to the constructionist learning.

Q7: You mentioned that the machine will actually now run with those. Where are you with that? When did you make the decision to have Windows...

Negroponte: That's been there...

Q7: You never seemed to have ruled it out, but when did you definitively decide that... how did you... what version of Windows...

Negroponte: Quite a while ago. We just didn't talk... there's a little slot in here for an SD card. That's how you *had* to do it. Now you can actually put it in the file.

[inaudible question and inaudible answer]

Negroponte: Unless we do something differently.

Q7: But it's a slimmed-down version of what? I imagine it's not Vista.

Negroponte: You should probably know more about it than I do. I haven't spoken to Bill or anybody since the $3 announcement, but I've heard it seems to be... isn't it a version of Vista? XP? Somebody else in this room must know.

SP5: It's got Office and it's got a bunch of learning components also, more than Windows and Office combined.

Q8: You mentioned a natural tension between yourselves as a non-profit and your partners, in terms of differing goals, and so on.

Negroponte: I'm saying we don't have shareholders.

Q8: Precisely. So your intention is to open-source as much of the process as you can, obviously there's a limitation on what you can do. How does that play in terms of the partners who obviously have different obligations? In terms of, do they, in terms of the process of manufacturing the machine, what is the incentive for some of the partners to go along with that process, and open-source that notion, that procedure, that results in the end product?

Negroponte: Well you know we've got three of them in the room we're going to talk to you about, and they're all so different. Obviously Red Hat has open source, and what they are again, and they I'll put up, AMD know better than I do, and [?] has to make a very big investment in a fab to do the display, making exclusivity in the display for a very significant period, for a significant volume, so each one is different.

I'm not sure there's too much tension because of the different partners. I should have put the partner list up there, but let me take Google as an example. What they just want is to see more people on the internet. Newscorp is doing it much more charitably, because of Rupert Murdoch and his attitude. Long friendship... I'm sorry?

Q8: Now that MySpace got it, gung ho.

Negroponte: Right. So it's just that there's different answers to that question.

Q8: Okay.
Negroponte: The only other thing to do is tend to where we are. And then I'll pass it on to Walter. We are perhaps at the most critical stage in OLPC's life. And it's very interesting that a year and a half ago, it was selling a dream. It's pretty easy to sell dreams, because people, you know if you're passionate about your dream, kind of wild, it's a very compelling story; it's you know, I would have the experience where I'd go someplace maybe for a two-day meeting, somebody would talk about it with me at night or on the first day, and then the next day they'd come up to me afterwards and say, "Oh my God! I slept on that; and this is really gonna change..."

You know, people would start sleeping on it, and realize what the impact could be. That was in the dream department; you know, here's something that we were going to build. Now we've got to launch. Okay, we need three million units to trigger the supply chain, and suddenly people have to make the decision, that really is to actually talk to Chuck and Robert, and... and there really is a purchase order going to Citibank, and that's all happening in the next 30 and 100 days, like tier-1, tier-2, to launch it.

And you know I wish it was 30 days from now so we could tell you exactly what the votes were and who was in the first tier and who was in the second tier, but it's launch time. And it's really happening. I have literally travelled every day this calendar year, and this is really a marathon, and we're all... I said we're threadbare, not just because of this week, but that we're really coming to a crescendo. We have OLPC's board only meets 3 times a year, and the next meeting is May 10th. Boy, we use those as real landmarks, and the countries were told just a few minutes ago in the other room, May 30th is their deadline.

That's the first deadline, and you know this isn't a sales and marketing job where you know when you come you come. This is, the train leaves. It's looking like a closing, you know if you're having a round of funding, it closes on such and such a date. If it's over-subscribed, it's over-subscribed. If it's under-subscribed you shoot yourself, or whatever. The point is, it has a real date. We'll all know May 30th, but I can tell you I *think* it's okay, which is the best I can do, I mean at the moment. And it's... I sure hope that the seven launch countries as we call them; there are three in South America, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay; there are two in Africa, Nigeria and Libya, and then there are two in Asia which are Pakistan and Thailand, and those countries have been talking to us ever since the beginning.

But now they're some new ones that have come, Peru is suddenly very interested. I don't know, Victor, if you want to be identified in the back of the room we have somebody from Russia... we have people here from countries we never talked with before. In other words, it may be that everybody's a dark horse, and all the people that really launch are new countries. I think the next few days we'll have Central America as a block. In Central American countries the Inter-American Development Bank has an MOU with us and we'll coordinate the Central American countries so we can view them as a single country, through the IADB. That's pretty important.

Q9: How can we [inaudible] the countries start to receive laptops?

Negroponte: All the countries I've mentioned already have laptops. They already have anywhere from 200 to 400 laptops.