Rethinking the OLPC Distribution: A "Base of the Pyramid" approach?

What would a "base of the pyramid" approach for the OLPC look like? While the OLPC vision is bottom-up and child-focused, their actual deployment has been top-heavy. There's occasional discussion about releasing the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop into the market to achieve a more bottom-up development, and the OLPC's original selling point to its manufacturers was that even though the profit margins would be slim, the market would be the next billion users (WSJ). So why not go all-in and focus on this record of success in the technology creation/diffusion realm, and apply it in the international development context?

Where the OLPC Project has intersected with the market; it has created new and valuable intellectual property (Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of OLPC, believes so strongly in the new technology that she's created her own for-profit company licensing the OLPC technology). The buzz around the XO has invigorated the ultra-mobile/small/low-power/low-cost laptop market; with Asus' Eee PC, the new Elonex, Fujitsu's newest LifeBook series, and of course Intel's already-existing ClassMate has received much more attention of recent.

BoP Spending
(on Flickr by Merkur*)

BusinessWeek's Bruce Nussbaum has already compared the OLPC to the Classmate from a BoP approach; but only focused on education and implementation:But one absolutely critical issue that trumps all the others is education -- how best to teach kids at the bottom of the pyramid. So far, the conversation about XO has been dominated by geek stuff, not educational stuff. [...] But where's the debate over digital lesson plans in local languages, team teaching, long-distance education? [...] Intel may be doing better than the XO. A version of Intel's Classmate PC is already on sale in Mexico and elsewhere and it is--this is key--bundled with educational material software and teacher support.
That's all well and good, but it continues an assumption that I'm trying to open up for debate -- is the educational system the best way to distribute the OLPC XO laptops to create sustained development? What would the the OLPC project turn into if changed to a technology-diffusion, base of the pyramid approach with the overall goal of improving communities by closing the "digital divide"?

First off, there are some immediately obvious downsides. The project would not be a one laptop per child; egalitarian, education-focused project anymore, which is a big punch in the gut to the OLPC vision. It wouldn't necessarily be a child-only approach -- children could be encouraged with various incentives, but once you go to the market, turning away customers over 18 won't fly for very long.

However, the current situation is limited pilot projects in mostly urban situations, mostly schools which are on-grid with Internet access available, with Peru leading the way in pushing for remote-rural tests. So a market approach loses something, but might make up for it in spread and long-term impact. A bottom-up approach is still very constructivist; and doesn't necessarily have to lose it's child-centric flavor. If the underlying goal is closing the "digital divide" and helping these countries; what you need is a self-sustaining project, not an infinite series of projects and recurring costs to the government for new laptops.

So what does it take for technology projects to self-sustain; leading to community development? Read on as I explore some possibilities.