XO deployment count?

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 9:18 PM,  <david at lang.hm> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, Eben Eliason wrote:
>
>> As an asset on our main website, it aims to be as authoritative as
>> possible.  The current numbers were populated via the wiki
>> (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments), which I believe is kept
>> mostly up to date (but I could be wrong).  A few of the numbers have
>> been adjusted or added since the initial population of the map via the
>> wiki (Ghana, for instance).
>>
>> If these numbers are low, or deployments are missing, please let me
>> know!  What other sources have you found?
>
> on the olpc wiki I've seen links to the New York deployment in the past
>
> currently one of the links on the front page of the wiki points at
> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/22041/ (March 2008) which
> states that 400k laptops are going to peru
>
> also on that same front page there is a link to
> http://radian.org/notebook/astounded-in-arahuay (also march 2008) which
> states 260 odd thousand laptops.

I may be smoking crack, but I believe that our contracts typically
have "options for extension" attached.  I believe the 190,000 machines
in my slides are the "completely paid for" machines[*] while the
larger numbers you quoted are sizes of the order if some/all options
are exercised.[**]

Naturally, the stories immediately following a contract being signed
concentrate on the "potential size" of the order.  But even the
"actually paid for" numbers are impressive (IMO).  I've learned that
it's a long and rocky road from "initial announcement" to actual
delivered machines, which is why I view new announcements (for
example, the Portugal Classmate deal) as highly suspect until actual
machines start arriving in people's hands.

In countries all over the world, XOs are *actually arriving in
children's hands*.
 --scott

[*] "roughly" means there are lots of minor details I'm omitting; Peru
has some dispute with its shipping company, for example, and there are
some lawsuits pending over exactly who is paying what to whom, and
some number of the manufactured XOs are currently stuck in a warehouse
in Shanghai because they were brought out of a "free trade" zone they
were never supposed to leave.  I'm glad I'm not actually working on
the business side of OLPC!

[**] Disclaimer, if needed: don't take this an an authoritative
statement, this is just a rough guess based on the casual
conversations I've had.  Like I said, I'm not terribly interested in
the business details; I'm happy just working on software.  I can put
you in touch with "real" people if you actually want/need a definitive
answer -- but they all seem pretty stressed & busy this week.

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )