One clunky laptop per child?

Like most socially-minded geeks, I have been fascinated with Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. Mr. Negroponte, a tech guru at the celebrated Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, unveiled his dream in 2005 to make laptops available to children in third-world countries across the planet. The idea was to mass produce the laptop (he would only accept orders in quantities of 1 million or higher) and make it robust enough to withstand poor conditions.

Unfortunately, the early reviews are somewhat mediocre. The Economist cites poor implementation of the technologies, lackluster go-to-market execution, the emergence of commercially available low cost computers, which the OLPC people regarded as a threat rather than competitors, and, most disappointingly, the "hubris, arrogance and occasional self-righteousness of OLPC workers. They treated all criticism as enemy fire to be deflected and quashed rather than considered and possibly taken on board."

It will be interesting to see if the OLPC is able to succeed. Hooray if it does; if it doesn't, it will provide a valuable lesson about how even the most high-minded of ideas should not be exempt from the rigors of external critiques.