Is „one laptop per child“ really as bad as the other vaporware/fraudware in the list?
As a non-deliberate grift—I guess the same math applies? Wildly overpromising and underdelivering on a picnic cooler seems somehow less morally problematic than wildly overpromising and underdelivering on an effort to improve third-world childhood education.
Of course, the counterpoint is that Silicon Valley (or MIT Media Lab) bros whose hearts are in the right place deserve plaudits for their ill-informed-but-generally-well-meaning efforts, even if those efforts waste millions of dollars that could have gone to more effective altruistic endeavors.
Which, like, yeah, that's an argument, I guess?
In the context of work with developing nations, the defense of good intentions is increasingly dismissed out of hand. Good intentions are often deeply problematic and can cause more harm than good - including capture/transfer of resources that could have been used in some other way improve conditions for people.
c.f., many NGO projects to improve stove design in less developed countries [0]
[0] https://nature.berkeley.edu/er100/readings/Crewe_1997.pdf
1. Products which failed because they were targeting their niche poorly (e.g. Juicero, OLPC)
2. Products which failed because they were outright scams (e.g. Theranos, Coolest)
However, I do think the failure of OLPC is still interesting enough to deserve a mention on this list. With OLPC in particular they were trying to be like three different things all at once and they succeeded at none of them.
- OLPC wanted to sell computers to the educational market, so they were selling lots of cheap machines to schools. This is actually not a bad business model; Google and Apple today have basically cornered that market with Chromebooks and iPads. Had OLPC succeeded, we could have had schools covered in cheap XO-1s instead. However...
- OLPC wanted to be a philanthropic mission to the third world, so they were designing the laptop with all sorts of weird features that only made sense for that market. Some of them are reasonable, like they actually intended it to be ruggedized and easy to repair. But they also had some weird features - like, it was designed around being able to mesh-network an entire village together with them. And at one point they were even going to have a handcrank on the thing so you could charge the laptop by hand if necessary. All of these features are unnecessary if you're just selling laptops to schools and they ultimately wound up getting dropped.
- OLPC also was built around it's founder's pet theories about constructionist learning. If you don't know what that means, well, then you're probably not a Hacker News user; because constructonism is how most techies learn a new system. We play around with it. The laptop was designed around a Linux-based UI called Sugar and was specifically intended to push Free Software onto the third world. The idea was that kids could learn how the computer actually worked by modifying the software onboard. It even had a view source button on the keyboard! All of that is catnip to people like us and completely useless for educators.
Ultimately they wound up delivering a very weird product that didn't actually do the thing it promised to do. That's very much in the spirit of a failed startup.
It was just a stupid idea and they underestimated the difficulty of getting them made. It cost far more than they thought and they tried to dig themselves out of that hole by selling them on Amazon and trying to use the profit to pay for the copies they owed to their Kickstarter backers. This caused all sorts of drama, but my impression that they did their best to try to deliver what they had promised.
Theranos was very different in that they were clearly lying about their capabilities, and hid the truth at all costs, up to causing serious problems for people that needed a real analysis and got a fake one.
What the world "needs", is an easy-to assemble frame that you can yourself integrate the functions you need. So if we made coolers to a standard size, with some standardized attachment point, that would be a start.
Then you could have a lightweight wheeled frame of standard dimensions and attachment points, that you could then integrate the components you need: portable power pack, BT speaker system, etc.
We have so few standardized systems for connecting things together physically. There are things like the screw mount for cameras, picatinny rails, and 19in equipment racks, for instance. But so few of the other items in our everyday lives, like BT speakers are engineered that way. They are all designed for style, and can't easily be combined.
If you had a system where everyone with nearly zero mechanical skill could attach things together, this would get us closer to the world where everyone who wanted one could have a coolest cooler. Otherwise you have people trying to stick things together with duct tape, which usually works very poorly if at all.
Also, it had the typical techie issue of "solving" a problem by trying to force more tech into it. Tech people are often like the proverbial person who only has a hammer so sees every problem as a nail.
They had to drop that feature when they realized that 1) there was no way to anchor the dynamo into the laptop chassis without making the laptop substantially larger, and 2) a child couldn't provide enough power to charge the laptop at a useful rate. They made some external dynamos, but I don't think those were widely used either (again, too slow to be useful).
> It even had a view source button on the keyboard!
And it didn't do anything. The button was baked into the hardware before the software was written. There were a couple of other nonfunctional buttons on the keyboard.
There was, at one point, even a proposal to include a disassembler in Sugar to let students reverse-engineer the (closed-source) wireless card firmware. I don't think that one ever got off the ground.
I have roughly an associates degree in education. (I don't actually have it, but I have more than enough credits.) This is a massive misrepresentation of the importance of constructionism. It's not a tech-bubble fringe theory. It's the only respected idea in pedagogics since at least 30 years. Every mainstream idea in the academic sphere about education is constructionist. Poststructuralism has had no lasting impact. C/ism is the only surviving school of thought in this field.
If they just focused on one slice of the pie, they might have been able to pull it off. For example, build an inexpensive laptop that could be shipped en masse to their target audience.
> ... and had a limited lifespan of about 8 days
Ah, so maybe semifresh then. What's the advantage of the packs then? I can buy such juice at the supermarket, no?
The advantage of the packs is that they can lock you into their ecosystem and charge you more money for the convenience of using the machine. Razor-and-blades is a common, worthwhile business model... if the razor can be made cheaply enough to give away, and the whole package actually solves a problem.
The idea was to basically be "Keurig, but for juice"; and it would have worked had they not charged SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS for the press.
> and the whole package actually solves a problem
The problem of having to carry one less item from the supermarket?
Soda stream is kinda the same, a machine which produce a easily available product directly in you home. But the soda cartridge doesn't expire after a week and can produce alot of fresh soda. So you save alot carrying and it's easy to always have soda since an extra cartridge takes little space. In addition it offer you a choice of how "strong" soda you want.
The only advantage of the juice packs is that they presumable ship it to your door. But it seems very strange if the packs actually are any fresher than presqueezed juice shipped in a regular container (which would've been more convenient). And from the few pictures I saw no water was added to the juice so no volume/weight is saved.
Keurig seems to be coffee capsules which arguable does solve a problem/brings convenience.
you can homebrew your own though, and use a much larger/cheaper CO2 source than what they sell at grocery stores, which I'll probably be doing soon.
It seems the initiative is still kicking since their website is still alive (albeit without an HTTPS certificate).
Sounds very much like a fallacy of relative privation to me.
They had a lot of cool tech, but all the poor integration of a bunch of unrelated open source projects and a lack of people with the ability to design something to fit their market.
The end result was a cool product that nobody wanted that didn't work awfully well. I now use my OLPC as a sunlight visible status board - and I still need to reboot it once a month because the kernel has some memory leak somewhere.