That is a nice interview. Eben Upton understood something pretty basic about manufacturing that the OLPC people aggressively ignored: economies of scale.
I can make 10,000 Raspberry Pi's for the same unit price I can make 1 million Raspberry Pis. There's a curve, of course, but that curve for the Raspberry Pi flattens very quickly.
[...]
I'm only seeing this from the outside but I think the main difficulty that OLPC encountered is that their minimum economic quantity was very high, and so they had to and get these big government orders in order to justify building enough units so they could hit their cost targets. I don't know what the minimum economic quantity for OLPC was but it was probably hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, and they had trouble to achieve that.
When it was early days for OLPC and they were receiving lots of positive press attention, I saw Nicholas Negroponte argue strenuously against selling directly to industry or the public as a distraction that was beneath the dignity of the project. At that moment, it was obvious they had no hope of hitting their $100/laptop target.
Yes - it was the classic "big bang" project, the only options were massive worldwide success or total obscurity. It relied on top-down funding to push it to the intended users. Whereas Pi bootstrapped from tiny initial funding.
The main problem of OLPC was Segway-level hubris, in my opinion.
I can make 10,000 Raspberry Pi's for the same unit price I can make 1 million Raspberry Pis. There's a curve, of course, but that curve for the Raspberry Pi flattens very quickly.
[...]
I'm only seeing this from the outside but I think the main difficulty that OLPC encountered is that their minimum economic quantity was very high, and so they had to and get these big government orders in order to justify building enough units so they could hit their cost targets. I don't know what the minimum economic quantity for OLPC was but it was probably hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, and they had trouble to achieve that.
When it was early days for OLPC and they were receiving lots of positive press attention, I saw Nicholas Negroponte argue strenuously against selling directly to industry or the public as a distraction that was beneath the dignity of the project. At that moment, it was obvious they had no hope of hitting their $100/laptop target.