Ideas on Marketing the OLPC

I came in contact with an article summarizing Stephen Key's technique for licensing new inventions: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/26/a-beginners-... [Yes, thank you news.YC]

Stephen Key is a serial inventor. He comes up with ideas then licenses them to large corporations. One of the key tools he uses is that he does not sell inventions, he sells benefits.

What is the benefit of the OLPC XO?

I'll tell you this in one sentence:

The OLPC XO gives your child a significant competitive edge.

I read the the hardware specs. Those were nice but not compelling. When I read the software specs, I realized that the XO contains many of the ideas that the MIT Media Labs had been trying to get into mainstream computing for years, but failed. A great example is garbage collection. LISP programmers have been using garbage collection for over thirty years or more, but its benefit has only recently reached the programming communities at large through languages such as Python, Ruby, and C#.

However, the XO takes garbage collection one step further. It will automatically save revisions of your files and garbage collect that too. When you run out out space, it tells you what junk you should throw out, and you decide what you want to 'keep'. Otherwise you never worry about having to save because the computer might crash in the middle of writing something. There is no other OS that is built to do that from the ground up out on the market. It is one of the many things about the XO that will give a child a competitive edge, having grown up with it.

More importantly, when they become adults, they will demand this functionality from mainstream operating systems. Some of them, having grown up with the 'view source' key will have the technical skills and the perseverance to make it happen. If the adults are too clueless to want it, they will go ahead and make it. How's that for competitive edge?

When I realized that the main benefit of the XO is to give a child a competitive edge, I found it highly interesting that the original plan called for distributing the XO exclusively to developing nations. Think about that.

There has been a long-standing discussion over the decline of the US educational system. A device that gives a US child a non-trivial, competitive edge should have its doors beaten down by their parents ...