Originally posted on September 9, 2008 @ 12:00 am
The XO notebook that was developed by the One Laptop Per Child organization will now be sold through Amazon.com.
The OLPC’s original plan for their XO laptop was never to make it commercially available to developed countries. After all, the goal of the program is to allow kids in poor nations to gain access to electronic equipment like a laptop.
But the whole program model changed when the organization thought of selling the laptops to people for the price of two. One computer goes to the consumer and the other one goes to a poor child. The consumer, in effect, subsidizes the cost of donating a laptop to a child in a poor country. This was the start of OLPC’s Give One Get One program.
The move to sell at Amazon is just an extension of their program and for once this can really help increase the demand of the laptop and in effect increase the number of children that will benefit from the program.