

Ideas on Marketing the OLPC - qaexl
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071125113058548
The article is a response to the Wall Street Journal's article on the OLPC. 
======
qaexl
I wrote a response:

I came in contact with an article summarizing Stephen Key's technique for
licensing new inventions:
[http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/26/a-beginners-...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/26/a-beginners-
guide-how-to-rent-your-ideas-to-fortune-500-companies-plus-video/) [Yes, thank
you news.YC]

Stephen Key is a serial inventor. He comes up with ideas then licenses them to
large corporations. One of the key tools he uses is that he does not sell
inventions, he sells benefits.

What is the benefit of the OLPC XO?

I'll tell you this in one sentence:

The OLPC XO gives your child a significant competitive edge.

I read the the hardware specs. Those were nice but not compelling. When I read
the software specs, I realized that the XO contains many of the ideas that the
MIT Media Labs had been trying to get into mainstream computing for years, but
failed. A great example is garbage collection. LISP programmers have been
using garbage collection for over thirty years or more, but its benefit has
only recently reached the programming communities at large through languages
such as Python, Ruby, and C#.

However, the XO takes garbage collection one step further. It will
automatically save revisions of your files and garbage collect that too. When
you run out out space, it tells you what junk you should throw out, and you
decide what you want to 'keep'. Otherwise you never worry about having to save
because the computer might crash in the middle of writing something. There is
no other OS that is built to do that from the ground up out on the market. It
is one of the many things about the XO that will give a child a competitive
edge, having grown up with it.

More importantly, when they become adults, they will demand this functionality
from mainstream operating systems. Some of them, having grown up with the
'view source' key will have the technical skills and the perseverance to make
it happen. If the adults are too clueless to want it, they will go ahead and
make it. How's that for competitive edge?

When I realized that the main benefit of the XO is to give a child a
competitive edge, I found it highly interesting that the original plan called
for distributing the XO exclusively to developing nations. Think about that.

There has been a long-standing discussion over the decline of the US
educational system. A device that gives a US child a non-trivial, competitive
edge should have its doors beaten down by their parents ...

