For those unware, this is the same people behind those Lil Nas X shoes with blood in them that made the news a few months back. While they do sell products, they seem to be less of a traditional startup with the goal of making money and more of a mix of satirists, artists, and trolls.
The best part is when you go to mschf.xyz there are a bunch of links, and when you click one it logs `TypeError: n.setAttribute is not a function` to the console and then doesn't do anything.
millions of dollars to build a homepage with some links on it that spit out JS errors is the ultimate commentary. i think it's genius.
Who's the target audience for this crap? A bunch of Hacker News-esque weekend projects that get a bunch of PR from Vice, WSJ, Verge, etc. every time they release something. Just seems like a team of copycats stealing hackathon ideas, giving them a slight twist, then calls it art and journalists fall all over themselves for it.
You won't see these publications writing about similar projects on HN, because they're not called "drops" (lol) and doesn't have an edgy site. Maybe I'm just jealous of their success, I just don't think it's noteworthy at all.
I had never heard of them before, so I found this article[0] which gives me the impression that they're a 'creative nyc agency / art studio'. No idea how they convinced professional investors to give them millions of dollars, but seems like they create "artworks" and sell them for pretty high prices. I think their target audience is every trust fund kid in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
from going to their website, it seems like they try to use clever web design and limited-time deals to sell weirdo and off-kilter failed products. I clicked on a link to a 'chair simulator' which ended up as a steam game a-la-goat simulator.
It seems like they are a factory to sprinkle some clever web design and marketing to create demand for failed products, making something out of nothing. With time as an incentive. Reminds me of the early days of Groupon.
Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup? It was always a nonprofit, so of course it didn't make money.
While the technology was lacking in many respects, it did serve a lot of children at the time, and proved the market that Chromebooks came to later dominate with a similar approach (linux-based OS with minimal resources at $100-300 price point).
Every child in the Uruguayan public system got his/her laptop, I don't know at a global scale but it gave access to the internet/technology to thousands of children that would otherwise wouldn't have. So calling it a total failure seems off to me.
By all accounts they were not really useful, broke easily, and couldn't be repaired in the field. Many countries backed out of their commitment once they tried out their samples. Those which took delivery ended up not integrating them into curriculum because they didn't deliver on their promise.
It did kickstart the "netbook" form factor, which ended up replacing most OLPC use cases. So not a total failure from a technology standpoint, like Juicero and Theranos were. But it is a bit of a poster child for everything that's wrong with the MIT Media Lab.
>Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup?
I'd say it kind of did (as did Netbooks as a technology for the most part as well).
It's smartphones really that won the segment that OLPC was primarily targeted at. Chromebooks became fairly big in education but primarily AFAIK in developed countries.
If it, and netbooks as a hardware category, failed, it was because in the end they turned out to not have been worth it. I used a netbook happily for about a year or two, it cost ~$400 if I recall correctly, and afterwards I donated it to my sister who I think used it for a while as well.
That's at least $150/yr for a low end product fun but uncomfortable product. After the netbook I upgraded to a Macbook Pro that was $1250, and I used it for 8 years, after which I also donated it to my sister, and she's still happily using it. That's a roughly similar $150/yr, but for a best in class product with great comfort and wide usability.
I wonder if anyone used a OLPC's for more than a year or two.
Arguably OLPC's approach has - in hindsight - been discredited, but yeah, it seems overly cruel to lump it in with Juicero or Theranos.
We do have impossibly cheap computers now that are far more accessible, that do nearly all the things normally expected of computers, and with widely available resources for programming on them - RPi, Chromebooks, etc.
The success of those devices relative to OLPC (with of course, the benefit of hindsight) seems to come down to a few major differences in the approach:
- insistence on highly-custom everything, rather than exploiting as much as possible off-the-shelf to keep costs down.
- insistence on targeting the absolute lowest-cost end of the market initially rather than starting at a higher price point and using that as a starting point for iterative cost-reduction.
The latter pitfall one still sees various hardware startups fall into with some regularity. Universal accessibility is a fantastic goal, but often the easiest way to do it is to sell something considerably more expensive first.
It did fall short of what they wanted to deliver as a device probably because it was far too ambitious... but they accomplished quite a bit due to that ambition. Consider that it was conceived of in a time before inexpensive laptops were available. In 2005, a low-end laptop still cost well over $1000. Things like a Chromebook, netbook, Raspberry Pi etc. didn't exist yet. If anything, the OLPC probably got companies thinking sooner and more seriously about the low cost portable computing space than they would have otherwise.
I agree. OLPC wasn't a failure in the same sense as the others. They created laptops, they got used, and a lot of people did learn a lot. It didn't succeed to the level they hoped, but that's true for almost all projects. It's easier to be critical in retrospect. OLPC did succeed in making the world a better place, and that's to be commended.
The trackpad had terrible bugs that pinned the cursor to the side of the screen. That's as far as I got using it. I'm sad that some kid probably ended up with one on account of me.
I was given an OLPC laptop as a gift, and learned that their CMOS battery (If I remember correctly) was hardwired, and when the battery died the laptop was useless. I sent my OLPC to someone on a forum who claimed to fix them, along with a fee, and never heard back. The only time I’ve been screwed by someone on a niche forum like that.
Still, it was a fun thing to play with. The form factor was like a durable OG iBook, and it worked well for basic tasks.
A key element of the project was their custom Sugar Linux desktop environment which would have wireless collaboration and data sharing as a central feature, and a suite of custom educational software to run in that environment. The OLPC Foundation never fully delivered on that promise -- the software they shipped was buggy and incomplete, with few applications available and many of the promised features stubbed out or completely absent. The only real saving grace was that their desktop environment included wrappers for Firefox and OpenOffice, and that was enough to make the systems useful to students.
The OLPC Foundation went on to create a series of increasingly ridiculous design renders of future projects -- dual-screen laptops, tablets with solar cells on the back, ultra-thin tablets... none of these were manufactured. Most of them weren't even technologically feasible!
The OLPC project did jump-start interest in ultralight laptops, though, and probably led to the development of early netbooks like the Eee PC. So there's that.
OLPC straddles the line between startup and social program. Given that it wasn't actively harmful [citation needed], it actually managed to produce the laptops, and they had some non-zero if modest utility, we'd have to place it in the upper ranks of the latter category. Even if it had zero impact, that would merely place it in the modal group [0], nothing to be ashamed of!
Chromebooks simply took over the netbook market which was already established by the time OLPC got some publicity. I think OLPC failed because it became more about proving that tech and "bold ideas" from silicon valley could change the world, instead of seriously addressing issues in the third world – it reminds me of the PlayPump.
right, didn't really 'fail' as a 'startup' - it just took a very long time to develop and tech continued to move/struggles to be independent and stable with manufacturer messes and giant competing companies, various interests slowing things down all while user needs changed rapidly and capabilities of platforms increased. This was really a long time ago early 00s things were very different and nowhere near mobile device era and so at the time was very noble and promising.
I didn't need to hear Justin Kan talking stupid claiming it missed the mark because of phones in that video about the toys ignoring the timeline/history, it was years before that which is a lot considering how fast things changed
Even 8+ years ago, OLPC was taught as a case study in business school. It was a largely failed project.
It's a pretty classic example of a CEO who was very capable at establishing business partnerships but had such a rigid view about the problem they were trying to solve. They never really proved that the 1:1 concept actually had merit, but ended up being so invested in quantity over quality.
In developing countries, the computers were too simple to teach effective computer skills. And in undeveloped countries, the laptops did nothing to address actual education problems.
Chromebooks have the benefit years of Chrome apps being developed to solve actual problems. They also give up a lot of the goofy ideas like hand crank recharging or mesh networking and etc.
I always appreciated CueCat because years after they failed I bought one on ebay for $2 and used it as a barcode scanner to categorize all my books. Worked great for that. :)
> I never thought it would go anywhere because who would buy hardware just for that? But I did kinda admire that they tried.
I think they gave away the readers for free. I had one at one point, and I certainly wouldn't have paid a penny for it. I think they were also the basis for quite a few barcode-based hobbyist projects at the time.
In retrospect I see it as ahead of it's time. The idea of "place a computer readable label on things to send you to a special website (etc)" is still alive and used today in the form of QR codes. The hardware problem ended up solved by convincing everyone to carry a computer in their pocket and image recognition, but the central idea is pretty much unchanged.
The Dallas Morning News sent them to subscribers with their Sunday paper back when this was a thing, because they realized nobody would buy one. It still failed miserably.
Man, that Jibo toy makes me sad. I feel like Amazon realized that they didn't need the screen or the character movement to accomplish 95% of what consumers were interested in: voice-controlled task automation. The Echo and similar devices make more sense, but I would have liked to see what Jibo could have become.
In some alternate reality the world is full of expressive robots... and probably doors that sigh when you walk through them.
There was a great little video on twitter I can't find where someone took one of those little robots with big on screen eyes and had it reading output from gpt-3.
It was cool since you could basically ask it anything - I'd buy one of those.
Calling end-stage capitalism ventures a stunningly dumb joke seems a bit harsh. The fewer people have surplus cash, the more idiotic-exotic the devices & services peddled to them have to become. Mind the gap!
Why though? It's the signal that you're lacking water. If you aren't feeling thirsty, your body is judging that it doesn't need more. There's special circumstances when you should push away any discomfort in getting it when thirsty, like when you're sick, and give it priority, but thirst is pretty much the indicator.
You don't even need to drink that much in the form of glasses of water either, because you are getting it from food throughout the day too.
One hopes there is some dignity to be found in the discovery that, if nothing else, your purpose was to be an example to others.
The OLPC thing is a useful lesson in product design though. It wasn't really a product, it was a mandate about what some people thought others should do, and now instead we have netbooks, the android ecosystem, tablets, and everything else. If someone in the world wants a laptop over other immediate needs, they can get one. Juicero I think had the same problem the rest of juicer market had, which it was a niche product for a nexus of people who both had an upper middle disposable income and thought it was a good idea to convert fibre rich foods into insulin spiking sugar water. Jibo's robot without a purpose was existentially pretty accurate, but they discovered nobody wants that kind of uncanny reminder of the absurdity of their existence hanging around. I joke, but a well aimed joke can destroy a brand, and having funny people around to take those shots can be company saving.
The thing about Juicero's story that makes it amusing is the fact the company managed to get several brand name VC's to pour in a metric ton of money. I mean in an ideal world, Juicero should have been something you'd have seen on Shark Tank right after somebody's pitch about socks with pockets or something.
The funnest piece of information (and a notable one) is the amount of money these "smartest folks on the planet" put into all of these bullshit projects. And the list doesn't even include the photo-sharing apps that met Bay Area's standard of innovation for rest of the world to follow.
Readit News
This is a product from MSCHF which is a $100M+ startup [1]
(feels like they're getting a bit of an astroturfed free ride of prime PR on HN because folks may not realize who is behind this)
[1] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/279769-42
They also seem to be pulling some wool over journalists' eyes by misrepresenting their raise as hinging on one or the other of their "drops".
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGHxXw7Qcs8
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/curtissilver/2020/11/09/push-pa...
So they basically put minimal effort into research and surrounded it by a pretty site.
millions of dollars to build a homepage with some links on it that spit out JS errors is the ultimate commentary. i think it's genius.
You won't see these publications writing about similar projects on HN, because they're not called "drops" (lol) and doesn't have an edgy site. Maybe I'm just jealous of their success, I just don't think it's noteworthy at all.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/21320127/mschf-products-jesus-shoes...
It seems like they are a factory to sprinkle some clever web design and marketing to create demand for failed products, making something out of nothing. With time as an incentive. Reminds me of the early days of Groupon.
Clever.
Where do you see a $100M+ startup?
On the page linked, I see a $12.5M Series B...
I would call them a small contraversial ultra-modern art company. A caricature more so than a startup.
While the technology was lacking in many respects, it did serve a lot of children at the time, and proved the market that Chromebooks came to later dominate with a similar approach (linux-based OS with minimal resources at $100-300 price point).
It did kickstart the "netbook" form factor, which ended up replacing most OLPC use cases. So not a total failure from a technology standpoint, like Juicero and Theranos were. But it is a bit of a poster child for everything that's wrong with the MIT Media Lab.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop...
I'd say it kind of did (as did Netbooks as a technology for the most part as well).
It's smartphones really that won the segment that OLPC was primarily targeted at. Chromebooks became fairly big in education but primarily AFAIK in developed countries.
That's at least $150/yr for a low end product fun but uncomfortable product. After the netbook I upgraded to a Macbook Pro that was $1250, and I used it for 8 years, after which I also donated it to my sister, and she's still happily using it. That's a roughly similar $150/yr, but for a best in class product with great comfort and wide usability.
I wonder if anyone used a OLPC's for more than a year or two.
I know people that created books and websites on a netbook, who got though school and business meetings with them. I never seen that for a smartphone.
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We do have impossibly cheap computers now that are far more accessible, that do nearly all the things normally expected of computers, and with widely available resources for programming on them - RPi, Chromebooks, etc.
The success of those devices relative to OLPC (with of course, the benefit of hindsight) seems to come down to a few major differences in the approach:
- insistence on highly-custom everything, rather than exploiting as much as possible off-the-shelf to keep costs down.
- insistence on targeting the absolute lowest-cost end of the market initially rather than starting at a higher price point and using that as a starting point for iterative cost-reduction.
The latter pitfall one still sees various hardware startups fall into with some regularity. Universal accessibility is a fantastic goal, but often the easiest way to do it is to sell something considerably more expensive first.
Still, it was a fun thing to play with. The form factor was like a durable OG iBook, and it worked well for basic tasks.
The OLPC Foundation went on to create a series of increasingly ridiculous design renders of future projects -- dual-screen laptops, tablets with solar cells on the back, ultra-thin tablets... none of these were manufactured. Most of them weren't even technologically feasible!
The OLPC project did jump-start interest in ultralight laptops, though, and probably led to the development of early netbooks like the Eee PC. So there's that.
[0]: see the Iron Law of Evaluation.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-wh...
I didn't need to hear Justin Kan talking stupid claiming it missed the mark because of phones in that video about the toys ignoring the timeline/history, it was years before that which is a lot considering how fast things changed
It's a pretty classic example of a CEO who was very capable at establishing business partnerships but had such a rigid view about the problem they were trying to solve. They never really proved that the 1:1 concept actually had merit, but ended up being so invested in quantity over quality.
In developing countries, the computers were too simple to teach effective computer skills. And in undeveloped countries, the laptops did nothing to address actual education problems.
Chromebooks have the benefit years of Chrome apps being developed to solve actual problems. They also give up a lot of the goofy ideas like hand crank recharging or mesh networking and etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
http://zteo.com/posts/sunday-hacking-cuecat-delicious-librar...
I never thought it would go anywhere because who would buy hardware just for that? But I did kinda admire that they tried.
One of those 'oh man great idea ... oh no I don't think it will ever work' kinda situations.
It was very much a fun early mass consumer days of the internet kinda shot in the dark / fun to me.
I think they gave away the readers for free. I had one at one point, and I certainly wouldn't have paid a penny for it. I think they were also the basis for quite a few barcode-based hobbyist projects at the time.
In some alternate reality the world is full of expressive robots... and probably doors that sigh when you walk through them.
https://elliq.com/
There's actually quite a few of these that I never knew about, aimed at old people. Not quite sure why.
https://roboticsbiz.com/top-seven-companion-and-social-robot...
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2679/2074/files/banner-vid...
In the context of the "loneliness epidemic" there's something very Black Mirror about this phenomenon.
It was cool since you could basically ask it anything - I'd buy one of those.
Or did they?
https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/24/amazons-new-echo-show-10-f...
I just went on a very enjoyable rant about this which included the phrases, “what’s wrong with people?!” And “just create something of value!”
There's an inscription in the marble below the list of products that implores you to pay your respects to capitalism.
You know, just in case you lose the sense of thirst for some bizarre reason.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/upshot/no-you-do-not-have...
You don't even need to drink that much in the form of glasses of water either, because you are getting it from food throughout the day too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipsia
The definition of "for some bizarre reason"
The OLPC thing is a useful lesson in product design though. It wasn't really a product, it was a mandate about what some people thought others should do, and now instead we have netbooks, the android ecosystem, tablets, and everything else. If someone in the world wants a laptop over other immediate needs, they can get one. Juicero I think had the same problem the rest of juicer market had, which it was a niche product for a nexus of people who both had an upper middle disposable income and thought it was a good idea to convert fibre rich foods into insulin spiking sugar water. Jibo's robot without a purpose was existentially pretty accurate, but they discovered nobody wants that kind of uncanny reminder of the absurdity of their existence hanging around. I joke, but a well aimed joke can destroy a brand, and having funny people around to take those shots can be company saving.
Ha!