On June 5, 2008, 5:00PM EST, in article One Laptop Meets Big Business The big idea of giving PCs to poor children has been challenged by educators and business. Here, follow the misadventures of One Laptop per Child Steve Hamm and Geri Smith of Business Week (With Nandini Lakshman in Mumbai) wrote:
"Now pilots are running in 20 countries, distribution has begun in two, and about 370,000 laptops have been shipped...During the week of May 18, Negroponte ran a four-day conference in Cambridge that brought together education and tech leaders from 44 countries. About 500,000 orders were placed, bringing the total to 750,000 outstanding orders." So is that 750K total, or 370K shipped and 750K _more_ on order, totaling 1.12M? Or what? Why doesn't management tell the community anything about sales figures? If the latter, a press release for the first million seems to be in order. Even if not, a press release for .5M orders would be appropriate. In any case, the unseemly hand-wringing over the alleged "failure" of a program approaching $200 million in revenue in the first year is the shoddiest kind of reporting. -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay _______________________________________________ Olpc-open mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open
