One Laptop Per Child or OLPC project is now focusing on expansion of its domain. This non profit organisation has recently decided to keep away from the small scale deployment of XO laptops and has started to focus on large scale deployments of the devices. This strategy is adopted to combat the recession. The OLPC will now break its operations on regional basis and start giving the laptops.

This change is also initiated by a loss in interest in Give 1 Get 1 program, which was the major source of funding for OLPC. The G1G1 program was a big hit in its initial and subsequent stages but last year the program’s sales dropped tremendously. According to OLPC founder and Chairman Nicholas Negroponte, “This year G1G1 was less than 10 percent of the previous year. Not good; perhaps in keeping with the economic times.” Of course, sales of netbooks, like the Samsung NC10, are actually soaring during the same tough economic times; so maybe there is something else amiss with the OLPC XO laptop. Apart from this another program called ‘Change the World’ was also discontinued by OLPC. This program was aimed at small deployments of XO laptops with a hope that it will bolster the program’s success in future. Unfortunately this didn’t happened and thus the OLPC now targets large deployment of XO. OLPC will now put special emphasis on Sub-Sahara, Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is actively getting involved in donating laptops to children in developing countries every day, but this project is not exempted from the economic crisis. Indeed, the worldwide recession has affected OLPC too and forced the OLPC founder to restructure and streamline its process. Recently OLPC has cut off 32 employees from its staff as a part of its streamlining process and the rest of the officials are bearing with salary cuts.

OLPC is focusing on the development of a $100 XO laptop for children in developing countries. But now the commercial vendors too have introduced their portable computing machines at a nearly equally competitive price. For prices as low as £160, the Asus Eee PC 701 4G was already nipping at the XO laptop’s heels, but with a new wave of netbooks approaching the $100 range, things look much more difficult for OLPC. This naturally makes OLPC face tough economic times, especially at this time of recession. However, the OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte says, “OLPC will be dedicated to bringing the cost of the laptop down to Zero for the Least Developed Countries — the $0 Laptop.” This is a very bold goal set by the OLPC team.

The last year was full of struggles for OLPC. OLPC’s top three executives resigned as they felt that the OLPC is getting more interested in laptop distribution instead of economic development. Still, Negroponte believes that the OLPC has ability to keep donating laptops in the developing nations. He says, “The future brings with it some uncertainty, some difficulty, but also the excitement that comes with the rededication to a cause, and a new path that will allow us to realize the moral purpose of OLPC.”

One Laptop Per Child, popularly known as OLPC has achieved great success in developing countries. To further promote this project the world pioneer in e-commerce, Amazon has announced that it will be selling the OLPC’s XO laptops through Amazon.com.

These laptops will be sold in the same way the G1G1 program was carried out. The buyers have to pay for two laptops out of which one will be shipped to the buyer itself and the other one will be donated to a child in developing country. Jim Gettys, vice president, software engineering, OLPC announced that only Linux based XO laptops will be sold through Amazon.com in US as of now.

However, the OLPC is finding out the possibility of extending this service to other countries too. The Linux based XO laptops that are approved for online selling has got an impressive configuration. All the units are powered by Linux Sugar operating system which offers all the necessary applications and a bunch of exciting games to enable the children get hold of the technology in a playful manner.

The hardware too is sufficient enough to handle all the tasks without any glitch. The XO laptops feature a 1GB of flash memory, 256MB of RAM and 7.5 inches of bright LCD. These laptops are optimized to support wireless networking too.

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project is really becoming a hot favourite in developing countries. Although the XO laptops are minimally powered, they are a perfect tool for making kids computer literate at a minimal cost. The goal of the programme is astoundingly to develop laptops that are even less expensive than the Asus Eee PC 701 4G. The only issue that the OLPC programme has faced is that the laptops used in this project are running on Linux based Sugar Operating System instead of Windows. While in some countries Sugar is considered as a great operating system, others argue that as the global workspace is dominated by the Windows based systems, the students should practice on the same platform; otherwise they will turn into computer literates but still incompetent in the Windows environment.

Thus the OLPC has decided to introduce new XO laptops running Windows XP Pro. As of now, Peru will be the first country to experience these newbies. In addition to this, a dual boot edition is also expected in future. To find out which OS the kids prefer, they were given both the laptops to work and play. The results were amazing. The kids find it easier to work on windows based XO machines but they still want to stick to the Sugar OS because of the array of pre-installed learning games that come with it. Obviously, both the operating systems offer excellent opportunities to learn and enjoy.