XO deployment count?

[david at lang.hm]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote:

> 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.

rough numbers are good enough for answering critics who claim that OLPC 
is a failure, the only thing is that if different people give vastly 
different numbers we end up looking like idiots.

the deployments page mentioned above is not linked to from the main page 
of the wiki (this is one of my gripes about most wikis, they end up having 
lots of information in them, but the linking structure is frequently so 
bad that you would never know it, which leads to multiple pages being 
maintained by different people, with conflicting information)

if you could pass this along to the folks on the business side. they need 
to realize that we are part of their sales/marketing force.

David Lang