$100 Laptop, Destined to Fail ?

There’s been a lot of hype surrounding this project that is the brainchild of Nicolas Negroponte, but one look at similar attempts from the past shown that the future of this project may not be as rosy at it seems. In the past, there have been several efforts to bring affordable computing to the masses, and most of them have failed. First, let’s have a look at several similar projects one by one.

AMD Personal Internet Communicator : This device was a package of processing, RAM, and everything else inside the box but with a woefully weak Windows CE operating system, with basic software such as Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, etc. and much more use than to surf the net. It was priced at about $200 and was a failure in most markets. Today, you can get a full blown PC for a little over that amount, and the PIC required an additional monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Simputer : This was a Linux powered handheld device intended to enhance computer aided learning in rural India, a purpose very similar to that of the $100 Laptop. The project failed to take off, and morphed in expensive handheld devices such as the Amida Simputer. In my opinion, this is the closest example we have to the $100 laptop. Now, let’s see the differences between the Simputer and the $100 Laptop, and there are quite a few. Firstly, the $100 Laptop has features comparable to a modern day computer, and is powered by Red Hat Linux, although it is unclear if it will be a stripped down version of Fedora or a restricted version. Other questions left unanswered are if we can install other OS’s on it ? But coming back to comparisons with the Simputer - the Simputer drew reasonable initial hype, but could not sustain it as the $100 Laptop has managed too. Also, the project never took off, but it looks like the $100 Laptop project certainly will, looking at all the support it has gathered, right up to the U.N., this is much bigger than the Simputer !

So, does all this mean that the $100 Laptop will be a success ? No, this does not guarantee anything. Many of the countries the $100 Laptop is about to be shipped off to suffer from abject poverty, and live on less than $1 a day, so how many parents would pass up the opportunity to sell their kid’s tool for what is for them a huge sum of money ? Think for yourselves and I think you know the answer ! In that case, there’s not much to stop these devices trickling down into the underground markets around the world, and I’m not even considering all the shipment re-routing, seizures, etc. that are bound to take place !

No offense meant, but have the geniuses at MIT forgotten to take all this into account ? Is their job just to make a cheap, fast machine, and forget the rest ?