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Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.
This little snippet is interesting, particularly in relation to notions of profit, changing the market, and the goals of the OLPC, which they say has largely succeeded.
Interview: OLPC’s Michail Bletsas Part 2 [of 2] - Gearlog
When you say that there’s a potential market in these developing nations, what would have to occur in order for people to actually begin to make a profit?
I think it’s already happening. The fact that when we started this program, Intel was saying, “You’re crazy. All these people need is one high-end PC per village.” And now they’re making the Classmate, and Asus is making the eee, and Everex is making their own machine, and a few other players are moving into that market, I think this is a validation.
People are seeing it as a market, despite the fact that they’re starting from the developed world. There is an emerging low-cost laptop market. I think this is a validation of our original statement. It helps our mission, too, because at the end of the day, we really want to be out of the laptop business, but unless there are a lot of player in the market, we do have a role to play at actually keeping everybody honest [laughs].
So you wouldn’t be averse to distributing the Classmate PC, for example?
Actually, what we’re trying to do is not distribute any PC ourselves. We’re trying to get out of the business of distributing the XO PC. We’re in the education business. We would like to focus more on how to improve education using those PCs, but, in order to get to that step, we have to get those PCs into the hands of kids, and that’s what we’re trying to enable, right now.
We don’t think that we’re the best way for kids to get laptops in their hands, in the longterm, but right now, no one else is trying to do that. But if you can get a few people doing that, we don’t have to do that anymore. We can go back to being a technology provider, licensing our technology, so that the cost goes down.
So ultimately, when you’re out of the laptop business and out of the distribution business, licensing technology is the business that OLPC wants to be in?
Yes, it’s software, and how you learn using those machines. That’s what we want to focus on, and what we’ve traditionally been good at. This is sort of a distraction that we had to take, in order to enable our vision. If we left that to market itself, the market would never pay attention.
