Having worked on some ICT projects in Latin America, Jordan, and Uganda, I have seen people decide not to provide some resources (like a library or a needed classroom) so they could have computers. When you are short of supplies it can be hard to turn down gifts, even if they may not be top priority. A researcher at U. of Washington has worked on a very interesting topic: the cost of a free computer. My guess is that we won’t know the training and support costs for quite a while, and what holds true in Libya may be totally irrelevant in Uruguay or Rwanda. I am also curious about how the kids will protect their machines. Many live in places with very poor security, low trust, and objects of value are hard to protect.

As for as teaching these poor children essential technical skills for the 21st century economy, that goal is way off target. Learning basic skills on a computer isn’t that hard and is much less important than developing basic math and reading abilities. Knowing how to solve a problem and understand the results is much more valuable than being able to tabulate the results in Excel. What these kids really need is a low-tech solution that’s much more difficult than manufacturing computers: stable governments and stable economies where schools can actually be established and operate without being torn to bits by coups and civil wars. Once that’s accomplished, the children might have a chance.

http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/itox.html

I gave him my bank account number a few weeks ago, and I should be getting rich real soon. The e-mail said so, so it’s on the level, right?

On another topic: why do some of these regimes want OLPC’s? For example, the Wikipedia article on Nigeria has the string “corrupt” (so, corruption would be included) about 15 times. Is the government going to censor the information or are the citizen-children be able to learn the truth about their rulers?

Nonetheless, experience with school laptop programs in the United States has taught us a number of things. For example, after a year or two of experience there is widespread support for these programs from students, teachers, parents, school administrators, and the public. That has been the case in Maine and in Henrico County, Virginia, sites of the biggest state and district laptop programs in the U.S., where there has also been continuing political support even after the initial “champions” of the program (such as Gov. Angus King in Maine) left office. We have also learned that it takes time, money, and effort for all involved to learn how to use laptops well to support learning in school.

Laptop programs in the U.S. continue to expand. For example, Pennsylvania has announced that all high school students will be provided with laptops.

Those interested in finding out more about schools’ experiences with so-called one-to-one computing can find information at these Web sites:

http://ubiqcomputing.org/
http://www.k12one2one.org/
http://www.aalf.org/

Also, I wouldn’t bet against Negroponte’s predictions for the future. Some predictions of his that many originally scoffed at:

* Architects using computers
* Personal/home computers
* The demise of time sharing
* The demise of the (printed) newspaper
* Mainframes morphing into servers
* Raster displays
* Digital TV
* E-commerce
* User-generated content

Well, he should be remembering his and Steve Jobs’s coversations with Ken Olsen, founder and CEO of DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, who is widely alleged to have not seen any use for personal computers.

For the formal discussion of this point, you should refer to (google) Clayton Christensen’s, The Innovator’s Dilemma. As he has written “Discovering markets for emerging technologies inherently involves failure, and most individual decision makers find it very difficult to risk backing a project that might fail because the market is not there.”

Your question is exactly the question asked of the CEO’s of the mainframe market as the minicomputers were being introduced, then of the CEOs of the minicomputer market as the PC was being introduced, and curiously not of the CEOs of the PC market as the early PDAs were introduced, before Palm Pilots, and even after Palm Pilots were introduced.

To Bill Gates, these computers are inferior technology, so massively inferior in his view that there is nothing that can be done with them that can’t be done ten times better with a computer that costs twice as much. But by dropping the price by 50% and then rethinking everything, discarding every assumption and building from scratch, you create an entirely new market, one that seems to be vastly inferior to the existing market, with a very long road ahead to maturity, and technology will, in a few years, produce a product that is the same as the low end PCs, so why waste all that time and effort.

I suggest that this might be a show topic, not on computers, but on disruptive technologies, and a disruptive technology is one that disrupts the normal product evolution and drops down to a very inferior product and grows from there. It has been a while since this discussion receieved much coverage. And I would be very interested in hearing of new and possible disruptive technology initiatives. Of course the cell phone is one of them, but it is now old hat and rapidly moving up the capability scale, exceeding the capabilities of PCs of a few years ago.

OliverCranglesParrot: you started out pretty well with the reason Bill Gates doesn’t do it, but you miss the fact that he is a billionare because he didn’t listen to people like you in the 80s, and he is missing the boat today because he is.

SamVieira: if the technology is “brilliant” then it will fail. The technology needs to be clearly very inferior, with a strategy of doing things the hard way, duplicating effort, reinventing the wheel, and creating a product that offers too little in the way of capability to satisfy the savey consumer.

The ability to create, express themselves and connect with each other is a powerful thing and you see that in MySpace and virtual spaces like Second Life. A great example of how education can go on in these new spaces can be seen on the teen space of Second Life and how organizations like Global Kids are using it to facilitate learning. (http://www.holymeatballs.org)

I think a lot of people would be happy with a $200 computer for their basic needs, and this way it would help finance the education use.

Both approaches are still currently viable, regardless of quasi-religious fervor which surrounds much discussion and corporate/organizational bloodbaths. Different solutions applied to different types of problems. Understanding the nature of the problem should lead to the appropriate solution (hardly ever happens). These matters tend to be decided for a variety of non-technical reasons.

(1) Get the open source community on your side to evangelize on your behalf and provide free labor (while still maintaining good ties with Microsoft …)
(2) Sign up third world governments (not always known as the most discriminating consumers) to buy these things in bulk (all the better if they can use aid money!)
(3) Insist on minimum orders of one million (to get your economies of scale)
(4) Use the press, and governments, and open source fanboys, to do your marketing for you
(5) Politely protest that this isn’t really a $100 laptop (wink wink nudge nudge), knowing that this magic number has a life of its own
(5) Use open source software, but insist on proprietary hardware, so when the economies of scale kick in and all the kinks are worked out, you can sell components (like the excellent display technology) to Dell, HP, Acer, etc. for big bucks!

Nothing wrong with making money in support of a worthy cause (especially in these days of corporate social responsibility) — an HBS case study in the making!

did all those genius indian engineers india cranked out and fly over here have internet at home growing up? course not.