Despite laying off half of its employee’s and losing some of its sponsors, OLPC founder, Nicholas Negroponte, did not give up his dream. OLPC reorganized its operation and Negroponte and Charles Kane, President and CEO, One Laptop Per Child is planning to release OLPC 2.0 a new netbook that would be smaller, more efficient and consume low power.
On January 1, 2009, Negroponte announced that OLPC is going to lay off 50% of its employees. The main reason behind this is economic recession. The G1G1 program in which the company heavily invested end up in huge loss and due to financial difficulties of the companies, major sponsors like Nortel, EBay, SES, pulled out of the program. Due to this financial hardship they had the organization had to bring down expense of its OLPCs below $500,000. Now, the company has reorganized its goal. It is now going to focus on Middle East and Africa. In Latin America, OLPC observed great success especially Peru and Uruguay. OLPC has decided to start a separate office in these two regions. In addition, the company will start producing Generation 2.0, the next generation of OLPC netbook. OLPC will also a cost free connectivity program. It will also handover the development of its Sugar Operating System to the open source community.
