Talk:Our market

Our intention is that the laptop belong to the child even after they leave school.

But this would make the laptop easier to steal in the long run. 68.163.239.61 10:22, 25 July 2006 (EDT)

Comment on: "Considering that there are many people in the developed world who want one of these, are you worried that recipients of the laptop will re-sell them?"

IKEA seems to have a very simple tactic to avoid their plastic bags being stolen from the markets: Inside the market you can get yellow bags to carry your shopping items. At the point of sale however you can buy a blue bag which you then take home -- yellow bags are never sold and stay inside the market. Thus if you see someone with a yellow IKEA bag you know he or she must have stolen it. Transferring this idea: Put undetachable visible marks onto the 100$-laptops for developing countries and other marks on those that go out to the devoloped world. A notebook that you cannot use in public without being immediately recognized as the bad guy who has taken it away from those in need will not be very attractive.

Will OLPC spin-off a commercial subsidiary?

The idea is that a commercial subsidiary could manufacture and sell a variation of the OLPC in the developed world. These units would be marked up so that there would be a significant profit which can be plowed into providing more units in countries who cannot afford the full cost of one million machines.

The discussions around this have talked about a retail price of 3× the cost price of the units.

Please do this. Not only can it help generate revenue supporting the main project ethos, it makes sense that there could be a real market for this that isn't being addressed by suppliers at present. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants a low-power, ruggedised e-book/PDF reader that is also a fully programmable computer with modern connectivity and storage (WiFi, USB, SD) - not a luggable laptop with ever more "features" or a closed and unmodifiable e-book reader that implements digital restrictions on what I do with it.

Not only that, but I look at what this device is and can do, and while I completely agree with the principle that putting learning tools like this into the hands of kids in developing nations makes all kinds of sense, then I also think that the Children's Laptop makes all kinds of sense for kids in more developed nations as well, and those of us who live in Western countries should also get on to our education authorities to get talking to OLPC and negotiate prices for these to be supplied for our schools and our kids as well - they're great tools and we should be aiming for the widest possible use of them!

Why hold back from such a great concept because we're supposedly "developed"? (I can feel a letter to my MP coming on as I write this.)