[dylan-m]

To be fair, OLPC was accidentally instrumental in making people buy cheap small laptops. The Eee PC netbook emerged very soon after the OLPC, and it was definitely responding to peoples' interest in the OLPC - particularly from the "Give one get one" program. The Eee PC became netbooks, which were eventually strangled to death by Chromebooks.

The OLPC project said "we can help kids by designing $100 laptops just for them", and rich westerners heard "$100 laptops."

The mistakes happened way in the beginning, along with a certain economic downturn. In retrospect, the interest of (on-average) wealthy people in cheap disposable laptops was obscene, and it's a shame the market allowed that interest to be entertained the way it was. Netbooks happened because we are incapable of accounting for the long term costs of crap electronics outside of futile attempts to educate consumers. Thus, netbooks and then equally disposable Chromebooks were dumped into the market without scrutiny, and computers are Google now.

[IggleSniggle]

That is indeed a fair point. I find it hard to fault OLPC for these dynamics however. OLPC had a real "hacker" mentality to it in the best senses of the word. It's easy to see the missteps in retrospect, but hard to see how they could have ended up anywhere else given the moment in time