Must-have or hype?

At present, not all of the software runs, the hardware still has the status of a prototype, and the XO has no security concept. In light of the shortcomings, the goal of having the laptop ready for serial production in 2007 seems very ambitious. After all, this would be the largest IT launch in history, and not even the staff at the OLPC expects it to run smoothly. On the other hand, even postponing the project by a few years would not be a catastrophe if the OLPC manages in the end to give millions of schoolchildren a chance to educate themselves in a way they could not before.

Since it was founded less than two years ago, the OLPC has gone further than many believed possible. Now, the project has reached a critical phase because the next few months will decide whether the XO is the real McCoy or just a bunch of hype. Once development of the XO is finished, interested countries will have to put their money where their mouths are and enter into purchase agreements for millions of XO laptops. The promises made by ministers up to now will be worth nothing then.

EToys offers pupils easy access to an experimental and design environment.

To make things worse, it is not clear whether Thailand is still willing to purchase a laptop after the elections in 2006. Similar question marks arise after the April-election in Nigeria. India also originally showed great interest in XO, but last year it dropped the project, saying that there were more efficient ways of promoting education than giving each pupil an OLPC laptop. India's withdrawal from the project was just as great a defeat as was China's. Negroponte's pressing-the-flesh at the highest political level is thus decisive for the rollout of the project, i.e. for the first round of deliveries.

In the midterm, the success of the OLPC will be measured in terms of whether the pilot project has gotten additional nations on board. If it is to succeed, the OLPC will have to show that any nation can afford the XO. As usual when it comes to costs, opinions differ. The OLPC estimates that it will cost some 30 US dollars to operate the laptop per annum, a price the organization says makes the laptop just as inexpensive for governments to operate as to purchase. That may even be true for Libya, but 175 million US dollars for a million laptops would leave a major hole in the budgets of Nigeria or Rwanda.

To make things worse, the OLPC has yet to officially explain what will happen with defective XO laptops in Africa, Asia, and South America – in other words, who will offer service and support and what additional costs the countries will incur. International financial service provider Merrill Lynch & Co. sees this area as one of the main weak points for the future of the project. The OLPC believes that the laptops will be used for five years, but if a large number of the notebooks are stacked up in the corner broken because of insufficient servicing, it will be hard to find additional countries to help the project reach its goal of 100 million XOs. And yet, Quanta's business plan is based on that figure. Merrill Lynch is more skeptical and has forecast only 40 million laptops by 2010.

In the long-term, the OLPC will have to prove that it can reach the education goals it has set for itself. Egypt has already shown how easy it is to run a program with good intentions into the wall. In 1994, Egypt's Education Ministry founded its Technology Development Center (TDC) to equip schools with computers, satellite television, and Internet connections. The project did not work because the technology was propped up on the current educational system. Access was regulated for pupils, and teachers could not cope with the videoconferencing system for training. A lot of money was invested in this IT project, but it did not do much good.

The OLPC has had a much more promising beginning because it focuses on children, not technology. Children can play with the available software and the system's open structure to learn at their own pace – dynamic learning instead of frontal instruction. In the OLPC project, teachers do not play such a key role as they did in Egypt. While the OLPC school server must be running for there to be Internet access and new e-books to be downloaded for use as textbooks, networking from one laptop to the other is possible without it. And as adults generally have a harder time learning new things than children do, this approach seems more promising. After all, teaching teachers how to work with computers is a challenge even in countries like Germany.

The project's critics argue that developing countries need other things more than laptops, which is certainly true for countries suffering from famine, war, and political turmoil. The XO laptop can only make a true contribution if there is a certain amount of infrastructure, a certain standard of living, and a willingness to fight corruption. The OLPC agrees, which is why the main parties interested in the project are from the G20 emerging countries. In addition, the OLPC does not believe it has a remedy for all of the world's problems; rather it sees itself as one of many nongovernmental organizations.