The thing that chaps my ass about this is that they won’t be sold on the open market. Which means all the ones that should go to kids in developing nations will instead go on the black market.
WN: Now that you’ve unveiled your prototype, what are the next steps? What do you face in the coming months?
Negroponte: The next steps are big. We face two things rights now. They’re happening right as we speak. One is we have five ODMs looking at this, to build it. They’re looking at that machine, those specs, and they have to — in the next seven days — come up with real bids. Let’s assume we pick one, then you go through a very complex stage of building prototypes. It just doesn’t just go from zero to 1 million units overnight. It’s a very complex process.
The second thing we’re doing is we’re talking to a more limited number of brand-name manufacturers — you can guess them all, make a list and you’d be 100 percent right — who we are approaching with the idea that they make a commercial version of it. For themselves. We’re not trying to do anything commercial, but if they do, and they — whether the right word is license it, or partner with us … then we get three benefits from that.
One is an engineering partnership, obviously with somebody who’s been doing this. Second of all, wider distribution — so this would be not just kids in school, but it could be commercial and retail channels.
And the third thing you get, within the limits of international law, you could have cross-subsidy. You could have commercial machines sold for $225. Let me pretend $25 of that went to One Laptop Per Child, and that lowers the cost of the laptop from $100 down to $75…. There are anti-dumping laws that make that not as simple as I just said.
November 17th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
This is excellent. It is a rare thing recently that I come across a project makes me feel like things may be going in the right direction.
November 17th, 2005 at 9:32 pm
The thing that chaps my ass about this is that they won’t be sold on the open market. Which means all the ones that should go to kids in developing nations will instead go on the black market.
November 18th, 2005 at 7:58 am
That doesn’t seem to be true anymore:
link to Wired article