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.

Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC

Nicholas Negroponte, President, One Laptop Per Child

Negroponte: September 20th it starts, then a break, then it ramps pretty quickly up. Currently it's scheduled to ramp up almost immediately to 400,000 a month.

Question: Would that price go down if more countries said yes?

Negroponte: Insignificantly. And the reason is Quanta is such a big player, they've got their suppliers ready to give them the large number price on most things.

Question: So they've already squeezed most of the..

Negroponte: So we've.. yes, I think it will go down, but not as much as you would think at the beginning.

Question: You mentioned too that, like you said, 30 to 100 days..

Negroponte: Yes. The 100-day is to accommodate countries who by law have to issue a bid, a tender. They have to issue the tender within the 30 days, but then they're given within the 100 minus 30, the 70 remaining days to sort of basically close the bid.

We're assuming that if someone else wins the bid, more power to them, because then,
that's why it's 100 versus the 30. It's the bid versus the non-bid situation.

Question: I've just got a question about this whole process. I know you've been doing these tests but.. and Quanta has a lot of experience manufacturing computers, there's no doubt about that. But, you're sort of the Hewlett-Packard, or the Dell, or the Apple. When Sony started making computers they did not start mass-producing this quickly, nothing as ambitious as you're doing.

So, I guess what I'm wondering is, why aren't you worried about quality control? Why aren't you doing this more slowly? To me it doesn't seem that prudent. What am I missing here? It just seems like if I were in a business school class and we were looking at this, someone would say: "Well, isn't there going to be a problem down the road? If they are going to have so many laptops out there and there is a mistake, how are they going to load the BIOS and who is going to do the support and aren't they going to discover problems in the first year or so?"

Negroponte: First of all, let me tell you that I asked that exact same question. And their response to me.. Quanta's Their response to me was: "Don't worry about the numbers. This is a very simple laptop. It's got less than 1/3 of the parts of a normal laptop. We've been testing the hell out of it. We're baking it, shaking it, dropping it, doing all the rest. Don't worry.

Somebody who makes 40% of the laptops… I think we'd all be more comfortable with a slower ramp, but..

Man 2: But Sony, Sony wouldn't believe.. I mean

Negroponte: That's a very complex, delicate device.

Man 2: But this is a new operating system. This is so innovative. Nobody's ever done this before.
Walter Bender : Linux. Linux has been around for ever.

Man ?: It's more stable than..

Man 2: But, Linux isn't so easy. I mean, there's all these distributions. Have you played around with five distributions of desktop Linux? I mean, I don't think it's so easy. You know what I mean.

[laughter]

Man ?: This isn't that bad. It's running Linux, works pretty good for pretty much everything you need to do. It certainly doesn't crash three or four times a day, I'll tell you that much.

Question: what will you do about problems, tech support problems, updates, things like that?

Negroponte: Well, updates, at the moment we update the system daily, and there will be a lot of update. Some will be auto-updates..

Man 3: In the field?

Negroponte: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Software. I mean, the hardware updates.. God, hopefully not! The antennas breaking, spare parts, there's a whole schedule of program for that, but.. I understand where your question comes from, and, you know, maybe you'd all sleep a little bit better if the ramp was shallower. But, on the other hand, the simplicity of this laptop.. if we were Hasbro introducing something you wouldn't be so worried.

It's the complexity and the delicacy that you associate with your laptop I think that makes part of that be true.

Man 3: Actually, haven't there been toy computers that haven't been so successful that were pretty simple?

Negroponte: Yes, but they were literally toy computers.

Man 3: The other thing I was wondering about is this idea that: "what if the parents steal
the computers or sell them Ð and I've read that that there is some kind of security" can
you.. you'll talk about that later on?

Negroponte: That's a great warning. I'll let Walter talk about it. Really, it's brilliant, the security solution. Yes?

Man 4: Most of what I see here is icon things, but there are some words. What are the plans for localization for each of the seven countries?

Negroponte: It launches with nine keyboards and six applications - eleven keyboards, already - and that's at least six alphabets, so Latin plus five. So there's a lot of localization going on. We could bring out to this room one of each alphabet you could start playing with they're fun to play with.

Man 4: I believe you.

Walter Bender: You can talk about that issue from a government perspective. Fundamentally Linux started to localize, we've got all the major languages. I think we're using technology like Unicode so we're not going to have any glyph problems with
using Pengo, and Kiro and engines that know about language and know about language, know about left to right and right to left, etc., etc.

The interface itself is going to require probably an hour's worth of translation for the entire interface. We're building everything with translation in mind. There's a huge army of volunteers out there doing translation.

The website has been translated into 25 plus languages already by volunteers, and our Wiki. So your translation is not going to be an issue until you start to get into some of the more obscure of the 500 languages in Nigeria, But, Nigeria wants to teach English. We support Igboan and soon Yoruban.

Question: But one of the things Steve Ballmer at Microsoft is going around talking about is the "next billion users", and the way to do that is by getting another 4,000 languages.

Walter Bender: But the people who are going to do it are those people, it's got to be a distributed process, it's got to be an open process, and that's why Linux is the right link to it.

Woman 1: I don't even know where to start on these questions.

Negroponte: It's OK, that's why we have all afternoon.

Woman 1: The first question of course is going.. language is one thing, cultural context is another, Where do you get the confidence that people are using it in whatever way you are anticipating, and I know you're not anticipating them to use it in a certain way. But, the same way you see it with other implementations of any kind of product there's a lot of.. I can't think of one right now but I'm sure we will come up with it.. there's the example of the well that was destroyed because it was a problem in a certain cultural context.. I'm sorry, I don't want to take too much talking, and I gave you a couple of examples, but, I'm wondering, sort of..

Of course on one hand you can say the computer is the Coca-Cola and it's going to be universally adopted and people are going to do with it whatever they want to but at the same time I wonder with this kind of product- are people just going to throw it away? Is it
going to be the [battlements??] that have been turned into nice [puppets?] and things that people did with them but they were not using them for [battlements?]

Another related question is, do you have conflicts or discussions with people who say:
"Well, [obscured by soda pop can opening] looking at the scale of things you are looking at on that end? In the complex world of putting a high-tech into a world where
it's critically being discussed right now how much effectiveness?

Negroponte: There are at least two question embedded there. Let me separate them. One is perhaps answered with: "How do you make an inexpensive device for the developing world? And, the typical way, if you go through China and India you see this
100% of the time, is to take cheap labor, cheap components, cheap design, add them together and make a cheap computer and cheap laptop.

A second approach is to take very large scale integration, very advanced manufacturing, something [obscured by other sounds] iPod. Take very large numbers and take very cool design, and do it that way.

So there is what I would call an iPod approach to what we've done. We haven't gone around and done ethnographic studies in Africa and asked anthropologists throughout South America and Asia to do it. In fact, we've said: "Let's make something like an iPod that is cool enough and good enough for kids around the world to really actually want it as they will an iPod and do that approach also to get the price down."

And the second part of your question is that very often, this appears in the press all the time, we get a question of this sort ..I mean I'm just going to illustrate it: "Why give laptops to kids who are dying of hunger, malaria, who don't have clean water?"

The answer to that question is very simple, just substitute the word "education" for "laptop" and you'll never say it again. Because, clearly, if a child is dying of hunger that child needs food right then and there. Education is not on .. it's a separate thing.

But when you solve and you address and you work on all of those problems nobody I know would say: "By the way, let's hold off on education." The reason you don't do that is because education happens to be a solution to all of those same problems.

Woman 1: But the question is actually a bit more specific and that is, what kind of education.. In countries like Malawi where the people's understanding of how you contract AIDS and the whole story is 95% and still the prevalence rates are going up tremendously, so education doesn't mean behavior change. It's much more complex than that.

So, I'm wondering, what kind of education do I get from this computer? I'm not doubting and I know that.. Google, and that's a cool thing for a kid to do no matter where in the world he or she lives. But,, you know, to access education you've got to have some kind of a background. And, of course, you are trying to work with the schools, but one can also see how some of the implications of even education programs have been completely failing.

So, I'm questioning, what's the model behind this? Education is a nice big broad word,
But..

Negroponte: Yes, but when both of us use the word "education" we probably use it differently, in that for me, education doesn't mean school and it doesn't mean teaching. To me what education means is the passion for learning. If I could build a world where kids are more passionate about learning and have a bigger slice of their day to engage in it, that to me is the solution.

If you look at other people who have gone in, just think of the name that Intel has used for their low-end laptop, they call it the "Classmate." That is such a strong emphasis on class and school. If we used the same name, ours would be called the "Kidmate", because we're very child-centric. We very much want the child to use it outside of school.

Yes, they bring it to school; yes, it is an electronic book; yes, it is all these things in school, but we've gone after education in a very different way than most people who look at it.

Woman 1: Pretending that the media [..] been doing this for a while, and remember
I've been reporting on this thing for at least the last eight or 10 years, do you have more information on the long-term experience that I should have? Studies that were mentioned but I haven't seen, so .. on the kind of computers that you have already brought six or seven years ago?

Negroponte: We had at least three or four presentations from companies that are doing this right now this week. I'm not sure there are lots of studies on one-to-one computing.

Woman 1: No, my question is, the kids that you supplied with computers six years ago, what has happened?

Negroponte: There have been lots of studies of those and what I'm afraid you're looking for is an answer like "their test scores went up 20%" Let me give you an.. the school that you saw in the slide, this September, 100% more kids arrived in first grade than last year. They didn't come from neighboring villages. To me that's an extraordinary measure, extraordinary. What's happened is that the previous year kids who were in first grade told their friends who weren't in school: "This is a pretty cool place to be."

And, if you look in developing countries, where 50% of the kids drop out at Grade 4 or
5. Most people think that they have dropped out because their parents want them in the field. Rubbish! They've dropped out because they think that school is boring. It bores the hell out of them. And they don't learn anything and finally reach the age where they just drop out and the parents say: "Forget it!"

If I could just change that, through the passion of the kids that's the impact we want to make, that's the sort of thing we want to see happen. It's anecdotal, it's not scientific yet, but we just heard the other day that in the so-called "pilot project" (I use the word advisedly) in southern Brazil two of the teachers were out sick and they couldn't get substitute teachers. So, they dismissed the particular class that had the laptops, and none of the kids went home. That's pretty good picture.

Man 5: Is there a curriculum? I know that is the sort of the antithesis of the approach of just approach of just creating a great passion for learning, but presumably you are trying to accomplish something concrete more than just being excited about learning, otherwise what's it for? Or are you just providing the computers and saying: "Go at it!"

Negroponte: Well, I don't want to be at either extreme. I don't want to say that we're just dropping computers. There's a whole schedule. People stay there for a month and fire them up; there's a whole rollout procedure, I don't know if Walter will talk about it, but we also are not doing curriculum. We also are not doing curriculum. We do not get engaged in curriculum. I was at the BBC recently and they showed us the ages and all the subjects. There was a big chart, then you filled in each chart. That was their view of curricula, we don't do that.

Man 6: How are you deciding [noise]… because you're saying: "This application is
supported, this application isn't supported."

Negroponte: Well tools for making things are what you find on it. So there's a lot of constructionist reading. So yes, we're slightly, if you will, bigots towards constructionism.

But, you can also delete everything that's on the machine. You'll find Logo, Squeak, and your favorite Media Lab constructionist-type programs. Different countries will have different textbooks in each country. Several right now are already translating or digitizing the text books. The text books will be on there.

In some often.. you know you can delete it all and add something else.. so we're not trying to

Question: Especially in countries that are trying to accomplish.. how can I use this to accomplish that? There is no place for them to go in terms of resources, or is there?

Negroponte: Now that depends on the countries. For example..

Walter Bender: Maybe we should touch on some of these questions after the software and hardware, because a lot of these things I think when you have a better sense of where we're trying to head with the software we can handle a .. this stuff.

I don't want to dismiss the questions, they're very important, maybe we can have Mary
Lou do the hardware, I'll deal with the software, and then we can sync up on this.

Negroponte: You're right, I'd like to ramp up. I'm not going to disappear.

Interviewer 1: In terms of the kind of networking component, how integral to that do you see the whole thing? In other words is that a requirement for your ... for this?

Negroponte: Let me give you a preview of what you are going to hear from both people ahead. It's not just… it's so intimately connected that the idea of children collaborating in the same way that those laptops communicate with their nearest neighbors, is deeply rooted into this whole thing. Very deeply. And I think you'll hear that time and again.

It's not just a cheap way to get coverage. Open source collaboration is very fundamental.

Interviewer 2: You mentioned Windows. You said that these would works with Windows. What version, and have any of the countries you have spoken with expressed any interest in using the $3 Windows, or not using your software?

Negroponte: Nobody this week, for example, has raised it.

Interviewer 2: And which Windows program would it work with?

Negroponte: I think we haven't gone that far.

Interviewer 2: It's just because it's…

Negroponte: ...to answer your question when you asked which Windows was the $3 version.

Interviewer 2: But I mean you said this will work with Windows.

Negroponte: This will run Windows, yes, they have these machines.

Interviewer 2: Who has these machines?

Negroponte: Microsoft. We send them to Microsoft for them to put Windows
on.

Interviewer 2: I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean.

Negroponte: Their developers. When they come off the assembly line we send some directly.

Interviewee 2: Microsoft asks: "would you send us some machines so we can put Windows on them?" We obliged and they put Windows on them.

Interviewer 2: But you don't know what version of Windows?

Negroponte: But it doesn't require…

Interviewer 2: But you don't know if it's a commercially viable version of Windows. You don't know what they're doing with it or if there's a version of Windows that they could actually sell.

Interviewer 3: But you're saying it doesn't require the plug-in ESD card anymore.

Negroponte: It will not. It did until the current version.

Walter Bender: I think Mary Lou will do the hardware, I'll do the software, then we'll have some more discussion about learning.

Negroponte: Mary Lou Jepsen is our CTO

Interviewer: So, I wanted to ask you about first is about the orders. I think you originally said minimum order is a million. So, if you have seven countries and 2.5 million orders, I guess that minimum has gone down?

Negroponte: The minimum has gone down and also I'm also statistically, putting probabilities.. It's not as if we declared it, as though The minimum really, depending on the size of the country, is somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. So a country like Brazil was entertaining 500,000. A country like Romania, or Peru entertaining 250,000.

Negroponte: Libya, interestingly enough, is entertaining giving its neighbor 125,000.

Interviewer: They ordered a million, didn't they? That was put out in the press release.

Negroponte: That was put out in the press release, but again press releases are worth..when the time comes, that is in August, we'll do a smaller amount in Libya.

Interviewer: What are you thinking?

Negroponte: 250,000

Interviewer: Oh, really?

Negroponte: And then 250 outside.

Interviewer: But Libya is going to pay for those.

Negroponte: Yes, at the moment the Khadaffi foundation will pay.

Interviewer: So what is the reason, is it that countries are getting a little more conservative, they want to see how the machines are going to work out, or?

Negroponte: No, it's actually the opposite, because there are more countries expressing interest. We don't need to go that much above the 3 million. So, if I've got 6 countries that want 500 that's as good as 3 countries doing 1 million.

Interviewer: So, in other words you don't want to do much more than 3 million.

Negroponte: I don't need to. I want to, yes, but I don't need to. See, I'm concerned with the trigger. And once it triggers then it gets a momentum of its own. There are people who see it working and enjoyed and get excited.

But I have a specific concern right now of 'launch'. It's like a rocket, you need more fuel as you're going off the pad.

Interviewer: Ok, so being the skeptical journalist, I'm wondering, are you having trouble getting the 3 million orders?

Negroponte: No more than you would expect.

Interviewer: And why are you saying that you're not taking orders until May?

Negroponte: Because I can't take an order if I don't really have a whole... I mean just now we're putting together the country agreements. We're asking them, literally in the past three days, we're putting together the country it has to be the same for everybody.

So for every country we've been reviewing the agreement for two months, three months.

Interviewer: What do you mean the country agreements?

Negroponte: We have agreements to, let's say, launch 500 [thousand] with a country. It's what we call a country agreement, which includes everything from a warranty, the schedule, to shipping, who pays for this, what happens, all the contingencies, deliveries,
and all. That's drafted, has been drafted for several months. The countries review it and then everybody throws in their suggestions.

We want to then accommodate everybody. Those suggestions have all come in. It's been rewritten and just yesterday and today the countries take them back out
again.

Interviewer: So they're identical for all the countries.

Negroponte: Identical for all.

Interviewer: And who's financing them, is it the countries themselves, it's not the World Bank or anybody like that?

Negroponte: No. The countries themselves are financing them. The Inter-American
Development Bank, we have a memorandum of understanding with them and they
Will work with Latin American countries in some cases.. help with grants and loans, but, at the moment the countries are coping

Interviewer: And the other sort of broad topic I wanted to talk about was the commercialization and the intellectual property. Some of this stuff... it sounds like the screens are those of the Chi Mei people. Can you tell me how it works? What you control, what the individual companies control. Like the AMD chip is AMD's clearly, right? The Wi-Fi stuff, that's not new technology, right?

Negroponte: No, there's some new technology, I don't know if we've patents on it, but
that' s.. now. In the case of Chi Mei, we own, OLPC owns, the intellectual property, that is the technology behind the display. We have given it to them exclusively for 20 months or 20 million units, whichever comes first.

Interviewer: Ok but only for use on these laptops?

Negroponte: At the moment only for use on these laptops. We are open to discussion beyond this, but at the moment it's just for these laptops.

Interviewer: So they can only use it for laptops and then you get it back?

Negroponte: We could take it back, or we could expand it, or we could do all sorts of things.

Interviewer: But that is your technology, so the screens you're keeping for yourself.

Negroponte: At the moment, well, we're giving it to Chi Mei to do.

Interviewer: OK. And what other technologies do you control on the laptop?

Negroponte: There are some power management patents. Mary Lou runs them all so she'd be the best at telling you, but it's really the screen and power management. And then there might be some mesh network stuff.

Interviewer: And then Quanta, they probably learn how to make cheaper laptops, I would guess.

Negroponte: There just don't happen to be any patents that have come up relating, but we have all sorts of joint agreements with Quanta.

Interviewer: All right. And then the last thing was, when you were saying while you would consider a commercial laptop you didn't give a time frame, and I'm wondering if you could..

Negroponte: Let me be very clear because I don't want any misunderstanding.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Negroponte: We will not consider a commercial laptop. We would not do [it]. If a third party wants to do a commercial laptop we would consider that. And we would consider it on the basis of numbers being so substantial that it may actually help get more laptops out to kids in the third world. That's what drives this.

Interviewer: That would be it. So if they sold one laptop and they gave you enough money that you could give a laptop to a kid in one of these countries..

Negroponte: That would be fantastic.

Interviewer: And then, oh, the seven countries you were talking about are what? You said that you think you have the percent.

Negroponte: There are seven large countries and then a dozen others. The seven large countries, we call them large countries but we're dealing with them separately. They are Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. That's South America. Nigeria and Libya, Pakistan and
Thailand. But that doesn't mean we've signed agreements but those are the seven.

Interviewer: OK, and those are the ones when you say you think you have 2.5 million.

Negroponte: No, because some come from other than those, they are coming from Peru,
Russia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Romania, Palestine, Mexico, Paraguay.

Interviewer: What about Indonesia?

Negroponte: Indonesia, Philippines

Interviewer: With the late launch and we get it for October. How confident are you that it's going to happen

Negroponte: I'm very confident.

Interviewer: You say you travel every day.

Negroponte: I travel every day.

Interviewer: Is that mostly a round of selling at this point?

Negroponte: I don't use the word selling, but because there is some sort of evangelical process that approximates selling, I'm the person who spends the time on the feet.

The reason for it to be one person is there is a common denominator. It's not your typical sales and marketing. I'm not trying to sell laptops. The concept of One Laptop Per Child was the one that was hard to get people to accept a year ago, so we refer to it as OLPC Upper-case and olpc lower-case.

The lower-case story is basically so good. People around the world accept it.

Interviewer: That kids should have computers or a device.

Negroponte: Yes. Kids should have their own laptops. One on one.

Interviewer: Then the capital..

Negroponte: The capital is just our's that's upper-case.

Interviewer: The difference is just laptop

Negroponte: yes