(2007-10-01) Nussbaum Vs Olpc

Bruce Nussbaum [says](http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/Nussbaum On Design/archives/2007/09/its_time_to_cal.html) the OLPC project should be killed. It would have been far better to begin in the villages, spend time there and build from the bottom up. Negroponte might have discovered there was little need for this kind of machine. Cell Phone-s are far more popular as the means to connect to the net in much of the Third World and cell-phone type devices rather than cute little laptops might have made much more sense. Tons of research show this to be true. In addition, OLPC was a high-profile deal of one man evangelizing top government officials on how he can save their poor children and, in the end, these politicians abandoned him. Despite all the handshakes, the Indian and Chinese governments didn't order any XOs... I have a bit of trouble with the wonderfully designed XO because it doesn't appear to have that panoply of educational software and teacher training that needs to go along with it. Good design usually (not always but often) starts from the bottom up and here I don't see input from the children and teachers in the thousands of villages at the bottom of the pyramid. I think providing a tool that's oriented toward creation gives the people in those countries the opportunity to make their own materials.

There is more questioning about the project fate, given the lack of uptake by those governments. I don't see the G1G1 model scaling enough to help that, though it's great that it makes these things available domestically.