MSN Money nay-says on the $100 laptop
November 20th, 2006 | by jg3 |Last week John Dvorak wrote an article carried by MSN Money called The $100 laptop: What went wrong. In there he talks about Nicolas Negroponte’s project to produce an affordable computer device for the third world as if it is already dead. It isn’t. In fact, you might note that they built over 800 laptops just last week. 600 of those on the very day this article was posted to the MSN Money website.
The article has a number of dubious statements. Like the fact that $100 could “could almost feed a village for a year”. Some math here: that’s less than thirty cents a day for an entire village to be fed? Assume three meals a day … a meal for a village on a dime? How many humans are in this village and what, exactly, would this be feeding them? Don’t expect the author to provide a link to back up that claim. The article doesn’t link to anything, including the One Laptop Per Child project (http://laptop.org) which it is reporting on in the past tense.
The article makes a big deal about the fact that the laptops the project is working on don’t meet the $100 cost criteria. Mr. Dvorak has been writing for PC magazines since I’ve been reading them I would expect him to have made some basic observations about economics and the market for digital equipment (and components). I don’t think that when Dell produces its next-generation laptops they really want to sell them for $499, but the price eventually falls to that. It is called supply and demand. The design of these devices is nothing short of revolutionary and as such not all of the parts are readily available. When production runs increase to the numbers that the project, er, projects well those costs should fall in line.
He makes another mistake with a point he backs up using this quote: ‘”And in today’s world the real value of a computer is it being networked,” says [G. Pascal] Zachary. “Finding a network in the poor areas is either impossible or very expensive.”‘ Right. Because there aren’t teeming millions of people with $100 laptops yet! The definition of the future is change. With a change in time and a change in the way that laptops are built and a change in their price per unit will come a change in the density of networkable devices in the poor areas. Bet on it. The laptops themselves can form a mesh network to communicate with each other and become a vehicle for distant machines to be able to access the Internet. In fact, the concept is not so different from the way the Internet itself works.
This article gets even worse when Dvorak quotes the same “Africa watcher” dolt Zachary: “The fact that these people need electricity more than they need a laptop is only part of the problem.” Ok, so in case you missed the fact that the laptop itself is powered by a hand-crank, perhaps you can tell me what they would plug in if they suddenly had a power outlet in their hut. What would it be? A hair dryer? An oscillating fan? My point here is that there isn’t electricity today and yet the people get along. Perhaps electricity could improve their quality of life. But do they need that more than information and communication? And if they have information and communication it seems obvious that it will get much, much easier to get people to invest their time and energy in other projects that will help them get electricity (and maybe potable water).
This article on the whole smells of frightened protectionism from a pawn of the PC industry establishment. I’m sure Gateway, IBM, and Sun didn’t mind reading the message that a $100 laptop is a futile effort. I don’t think that this project really risks draining the brain trust. Belive me, there are a lot of ways that corporate America is wasting resources. If a company like AMD wants to put a few engineers on this instead of Fusion, hey let them. Perhaps they wager some engineering time on this project and it pays of big time for them when their chips are in the most widely distributed computers on the planet. Yeah, let them waste their time.
But don’t talk about this project in the past tense quite yet. In fact, if you’re John Dvorak it is probably best if you just don’t talk at all.
Filed under: Real Life, The Internet
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