At the time I believed the proliferation of netbooks was caused by OLPC. I don't think it was a fundamentally bad idea either.
The project identified a legitimate need for a small, durable, and cheap laptop, but failed on a number of specifics: it did worse as a not-for-profit than it would have done as a company, the design was child-centric instead of something adults could use too, and Linux on every machine was a design decision that only made sense in the flawed context of a not-for-profit.
The MSCHF message of "press [F] to pay respects to capitalism" is incredibly ironic when applied to OLPC, since it arguably failed due to not being capitalist enough and was succeeded by for-profit companies who remade a similar product for a wider and less charitable audience.
The project identified a legitimate need for a small, durable, and cheap laptop, but failed on a number of specifics: it did worse as a not-for-profit than it would have done as a company, the design was child-centric instead of something adults could use too, and Linux on every machine was a design decision that only made sense in the flawed context of a not-for-profit.
The MSCHF message of "press [F] to pay respects to capitalism" is incredibly ironic when applied to OLPC, since it arguably failed due to not being capitalist enough and was succeeded by for-profit companies who remade a similar product for a wider and less charitable audience.