When it rains it pours, and the One Laptop Per Child program is drowning in bad press. Last week, Intel backstabbed the non-profit. This week, a review in the Economist pans the Little Laptop that Couldn’t, calling it a “plastic paperweight.”

The Economist identified three categories of problems with the XO laptop. First, in its eagerness to “reinvent the wheel,” OLPC has created a laptop that is technically cumbersome and counterintuitive. Second, the laptop lacks documentation (a user’s manual) or ways to integrate with existing networks. And third, the XO has many emerging competitors.

Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford has signed a memorandum of understanding with OLPC to buy 15,000 of the XO laptops for Birmingham K-8 students. Interestingly, the last and final Economist criticism could fit the Birmingham mayor just as well as its OLPC target. The Economist wrote:

“This leads to the final problem that has done the most to disappoint OLPC’s fans: the hubris, arrogance and occasional self-righteousness of OLPC workers. They treated all criticism as enemy fire to be deflected and quashed rather than considered and possibly taken on board. Overcoming this will be essential if the project is to succeed past its first release. Technology products improve based on user feedback. The OLPC staff will need to learn to listen to the candid criticism of outsiders for the second-generation of the laptop—or they do not deserve to build one”