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[mavrothal]

This summer I was on vacations abroad and I had the chance to see some old friends. During a visit in one's home  she proceeded at a point to tell me all exited about her "new jewel", an MSI netbook. I appreciated the machine and I said that I have  the forefather of the netbooks almost 2 years now (that served me very well in this vacation too, I may add).  So a couple of days latter when she was visiting our place she asked about it and I "showcased" the XO-1 for her.
The 10-11 years old had a blast with Physics Activity and the 8-9 with the "artificial intelligence" of Speak.
She was impressed by the full tablet functionality and was pleased and surprised when I opened videos, slide shows, music and word documents from her windows USB stick in Ubuntu.
She was amazed  with the screen under direct sun light in the afternoon, and even more in the evening when with the lights off and the XO screen backlight off, I used a candle to read a paragraph of a book on the screen (try it)!
She was genuinely shocked when I "spilled" half a glass of water on the keyboard and screamed terrified "I believe you", when I offered to do the Negroponte "through the XO on the floor" trick! <a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/-tqFEzDou6s" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/-tqFEzDou6s</a>
Needles to shay that she found the XO "toyish but VERY cute".
Latter at the end of the night and during the "farewell session", she actually apologized for bragging about her MSI the other day!!!

I certainly do not claim that the XO-1 is a better machine than MSI or any other netbook, and readers of this site know it has a number of problems and limitations compared to modern hardware, and limited ease-of-use/familiarity for the average person out there that wants things to just work.
The morale of all these is that after 2 years and a flux of netbooks, the XO-1 can still impress even Netbook owners!!!

With the   improved performance of the XO-1.5 maybe is time to rethink availability policies. I do not know if another XO-1.5 G1G1 offering will come up this holiday season, but regardless of that I believe is time XO-1.5 to become available to retail.
OLPC can get a $50/unit donation, impose the use of Sugar/GNOME-Linux as the main OS of the machines sold, and let retailers get machines from QUANTA, customize them and support them as they see fit, and put them in the market for the price they think they can get.
I know this has a lot of implementation/market problems but is up to the entrepreneurs to work them out. All OLPC shoud do is guarantee that the machines leave the factory in their original configuration and that a donation is included in the price. Anything else should not be their concern at this point.
The anti-theft features of the XO and the so far experience shows that the black market should not be a problem. So deployments and kids around the world are not at risk by the XO-1.5 market.

This approach also has a lot of risk in "principles", mainly the use of windows that now dominates the netbook market too. But I believe that this is a fake dilemma. If XO-1.5 can run Windows and MS wants to make it available to XO-1.5 owners, will do it regardless of how the XOs are purchased. Users can take advantage of it regardless of what OLPC wants to do with the machines. So this is a case that you "should not worry" because either is not going to happen or if it happens there is nothing you can do about it!

Last year's G1G1 was a disaster presumably because of the economic turn-down but this year things do not look much brighter either. A $50 revenue/machine can bring the price at competitive levels (with a competitive machine) and actually generate a much larger "donation" sum for OLPC. This will advance its goals much more effectively than any G1G1 limited-time-offer,  can.

[jrghoull]

wayan i'm surprised you're toting them to retail. Not that i think its a bad idea (in fact i think it could be fantastic if implimented correctly) but rather that just because a large number of olpc people whine for certain things like XOs being sold in stores...doesn't mean NN is actually going to do it.

EDIT: meant to say 'Mavrothal'...sorry about that wayan!!!

[Wayan Vota]

That would be a post by Mavrothal, not me, that you just replied to Jr Ghoull.

[sola]

I strongly support this motion, I hope Mr Negroponte takes this advice.

See the http://www.xoforall.com for even more reasons (an earlier attempt to persuade OLPC to free the XO).

The retail version SHOULD absolutely set the Gnome desktop as default and make Sugar an easy-to-configure secondary option.

If believe, the $50 markup would be decent, and could even be a marketing item. For example, all publicly sold XOs should have a sticker which says that the buyer supports developing-world OLPC projects by their XO purchase.

With a $50 markup the price would come at ~280USD (180 for production, 50 for distribution&warranty, 50 donation) which would be an appealing price for a LOT of people and school projects.

[mavrothal]

If believe, the $50 markup would be decent, and could even be a marketing item. For example, all publicly sold XOs should have a sticker which says that the buyer supports developing-world OLPC projects by their XO purchase.

RIGHT! something like the red iPod.
Maybe reserve a specific XO color combination just for these machines.
How cool would that be!  

With a $50 markup the price would come at ~280USD[

Which is a nice round 200 euros these days! A sweet spot at the other side of the Atlantic and certainly a marketing plus where most netbooks are struggling to make €300, while quite often go for €400+ (yes, I know, there are given away by the wireless carriers but go with a contract that will cost you €1000+...)

[jrghoull]

i wonder how the heck that happened! sorry wayan!

[jrghoull]

you know, while i would like to buy an XO 1.5, and going along with that would totally be up for another g1g1, at the same time, I can understand not selling the XO 1.5 commercially.Because with something like this, olpc has to weigh potential pros to potential cons.

Pretty much whoever is/was going to buy an XO-1 has already done so. People who would be willing to buy an XO-1.5 are the same people who bought an XO-1. Why do I say that? Because it seems to me that the potential consumers of this product wouldn't be buying it because of power increase (the xo1.5 is pretty much as powerful as the standard netbook isn't it?) but because they feel such a deep connection to the project. Since the people buying the machine would then be doing nothing more than upgrading, the group would not be increasing in size and therefor would not benefit as a whole from the sales. While upgrading is fun, and its great to g1g1, obviously this NGO is not set up to persue commercial interests. And since it gains little to no money from the sales, the potential growth in the size of the olpc community is really the only possible reason for doing it. You might say "what about the whole 'give one' aspect of the project, don't they gain from that? Well yes, they would be, given that the goal of the project is to give out XOs to children in impoverished nation...but...feel free to correct me if i'm wrong, wasn't the give one aspect of that g1g1 a failure? I read at one point that only a fraction of the number of XOs  that were supposed to be given out ever actually were. If this is right then this even eliminates the idea that someone at olpc headquarter might say "hey lets do a g1g1 for the XO 1.5 in order to get the unit into the hands of more children." Of course that assumes that the higher ups at olpc actually care about which unit the children have. And I dont think they do. I think whats important to them is getting XO units, regardless of which of the two versions it is. And thats understandible in its own way...but it also another reason why there wont and probably shouldn't be a g1g1 for xo 1.5

/unorganized rant

[RalleyWolf]

hello jrghoull.

I have to disagree with you on one point there. Now you said that the people who will buy the xo 1.5s are people who already own xo's and are into the community. Well I think that a lot of parents would be tempted to buy these machines for their kids, if they became available at a competitive price. It would make a great Christmas or birthday present. If kids find out that they are available at retail, they might even ask their parents for them.

Also, lets face it, Alot of people have never even heard of olpc. (at least people where I live) Putting these machines in retail outlets would make dramatically increase  awareness of them. (even if they don't buy them.)

[davewa]

And if they include a pre-addressed envelope and a flyer about making a donation to OLPC in the retail box, even better.