aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, December 14, 2007

A 9-year-old’s view of the $100 laptop

A BBC reporter tells the tale of bringing his son, Rufus, an XO from One Laptop per Child:

Rufus is using his laptop to write, paint, make music, explore the internet, and talk to children from other countries.

Because it looks rather like a simple plastic toy, I had thought it might suffer the same fate as the radio-controlled dinosaur or the roller-skates he got last Christmas - enjoyed for a day or two, then ignored.

Instead, it seems to provide enduring fascination.

The XO is a magnificent marvel of engineering. It is pretty much everything Nicholas Negroponte set out for it to be.

Here (and in video above) David Pogue sings its praises. Here a must-see story from the week before last from 60 Minutes. And here the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Stecklow says competition from companies like Intel and Microsoft may one day achieve Negroponte’s larger goal, even as they have hurt the XO’s chances of success:

BOB GARFIELD: So let me ask you this, Steve. Negroponte’s goal was to make laptops available to the poorest schoolchildren in the most disadvantaged countries of the world.

But if it turns out that private corporations see those places as potentially lucrative marketplaces and themselves find a way to get their laptops and software into the hands of the poorest schoolchildren in the most disadvantaged countries of the world, does it really matter whether Negroponte’s laptop project itself succeeds? Hasn’t he still achieved his goal?

STEVE STECKLOW: Well, I would say yes. When I interviewed him and asked him this very question, he did say he would consider it a success if something like 150 million schoolchildren in 2008 receive Intel Classmates and not his machine.

But the fact is, is Intel and Microsoft both told me that they look at a 15-year timeframe, so it’s going to take a lot longer.

And I think he should consider it a success, but if you spent more than two years developing a unique machine from scratch and actually built the thing, which has gotten rave reviews, you would hope that it would become much more than just a niche player in this market.

So I sense definite disappointment. I think the guy deserves a lot of credit for making this happen, because, in fact, it is beginning to happen.

To me it’s a demonstration of entrenched market forces acting to slow innovation and harm a global public good. The XO is a significant remarkable technological achievement done wholly outside of the market. Negroponte’s efforts attracted those companies in and the impact of their entry is that they will delay the effort to get computers into the hands of the world’s needy children.

Negroponte was exactly right when he said in a recent lecture at MIT that Intel is going to the same governments he’s trying to sell and dumping below cost computers to kill the XO, “Intel should be ashamed of itself. It’s just shameless.”