The OLPC project started with the best intentions of bright people. It got hyped beyond reason, first by some of its leaders (viz. Negroponte), then by gullible politicians and — at another level — by gullible idealists that failed to see what was in front of them.

Throughout its history the OLPC was flawed; flawed relationships with corporations, flawed marketing, flawed software. The intentions may have been great, when Negroponte rejected Steve Jobs offer for Mac OS X, because ‘it was not open source’, but a few years down the road, with the OLPC project laying off half of its staff, with Sugar having become something different entirely and many of the key people behind the original laptop out of the project, with Windows XP being targeted as the de facto OS for the second version of the laptop, due in some years I guess, it seems ironic, it seems stupid, but most importantly it proves that the OLPC XO-2 will be nothing if not just another ‘netbook’ device, with no particular focus on education, the open source and free culture/information movements and so on.
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It was in 1990 that Microsoft released Windows 3.0, making the PC the dominant platform as it is today, by providing a cheap, easy to use environment for people to use and developers to program (without the horrible Apple royalties that had to be paid for Macintosh development at the time). Windows 3.0, as other graphical desktops before it (Atari, AmigaOS, GEM Desktop etc.) all borrowed from Xerox’ innovation which was commercially introduced to the world with the Macintosh in 1984. But all of those technologies, the concept of a file and a folder represented by a 2D rectangular entity on the screen and the hierarchies that emerge from it are 30 year old ideas that have been proven not to be sufficient for the complex interactions between pieces of information of our times. Computers have grown from (solely) scientific, military, research and statistical instruments to everyday companions in all aspects of modern life: music, cinema, communication, entertainment, task assistance, education; I am sure there are much more.

For those interactions, the leading desktop companies of the early 90s — namely Apple Computer Inc. and Microsoft Corporation — were considering object-oriented desktops with much increased capabilities and a completely departure from the archaic model even ‘advanced’ modern desktop environments (such as those offered by MacOS X and modern Windows as well as all Linux desktops). Projects such as the much-awaited Cairo operating system from Microsoft or the sophisticated Copland successor to MacOS from Apple, gave me, and I am sure millions of others hope for a better future; a time when interacting with your computer, even with the limited CPU power of the mid-90s would be much more sophisticated than the poor experience of Windows or MacOS. Unfortunately, such technologies were never realised in a commercial form. Windows is the most popular desktop operating system in the world, but is still based on 30 year old concepts. Apple Computer, although it provides by far the most well-done integration of UNIX with a graphical, polished environment, offers eye candy and object-orientation which is skin deep. Be Inc., perhaps the only true innovator in terms of desktop innovation of the last decade, is now defunct.
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