I have long thought that the biggest blunder made by Negroponte from the beginning of the One Laptop Per Child program was the name itself. I’ve brought this point up before, but calling the machine a laptop brings back an unwelcome and misguided familiarity with the program before you know anything about it. As I have spoken to friends and family about OLPC, the first question that they always have is “Do poor people really need a laptop?” I think that the best way to reply is “No, but they do need education. This is not about the laptop, it is about the program to disseminate a learning tool.”
The language calling the XO a laptop is harmful to the goal of the project. It allows people to dismiss the project early on as unnecessary, and act as if the goal of the project is the first world injecting forced technology into the third world. It damages the image of the project.
It also allows hardware manufacturers compete with the project by undercutting the OLPC with a similar “laptop” sold below cost. The competition is often a fully featured laptop computer, lacking the educational program structure and support of the OLPC program. 60 Minutes covered OLPC last night, and they spoke specifically to Intel attacking the program by attempting to sell cheap computers to the same countries, but at a fraction of the manufacturing cost. If the focus of the program was access to education and a revolutionary education program, rather than the hardware itself, this would take away the power that the competition already holds.
Here’s the video of the 60 minutes episode from last night: