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What Happened to Simputer?
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com has published a brief update on the much-heralded Simputer, the Linux-based 'platform for social change' that was intended to bring inexpensive, easy-to-use computers to rural Indian villages. In the last 12 months, only about 4,000 units have been sold -- well below the planned 50,000+ units. Three Simputer models priced from $240 to $480 were introduced by PicoPeta one year ago, whereas the original goal was a maximum of $200. A cost-reduced redesign is reportedly in the works."
200 USD ~ 8600 Indian Rupees There is not money for some people even to feed themselves and heir children ... How would they buy computers ?
This should be a familiar problem. You try to sell a cheaper system by stripping out features. But to get rid of those features, you have to tool up from scratch, and your system ends up costing more money than you save. That's what killed the legacy-free PC, and a lot of other stuff.
Yay for duplicated comments! Never complain about the editors again.
If this village can manage to sustain the cost of a 'net connection, they are now connected to the "World Brain" where they can access current information to address their needs - not a bad return for a $2.50 initial + $0.50/month per person investment.
Maybe it's not as compelling as a diesel pump to bring up the well water, but it's about the same cost.
(Note: I may be an economic conservative, but I did not vote for GWB.)
I would hope not. Where people got the idea that Bush is fiscally conservative is beyond me. Him and his super fun pals are doing everything in their power to bankrupt the country and ruin our economy. Where they got the idea that he is even a conservative at all is also mind boggling.
Republican does not equal conservative.
"starving to death the next day"
......
Not all third world countries have people dying of starvation. Only some. In places like India, Indonesia, they may not have the best nutrition, but that is far away from dying of hunger.
'high risk of deadly disease"
This is why linking them up to technology helps. It allows doctors to reach rural villagers, teaching about how to prevent spread of certain types of disease, warning them of impending outbreaks, etc.
"But then what do you do with that education when you have no infrastructure to support it."
What infrastructure do you need? Fishermen need to know weather reports (the good stuff, not weather.com) Their lives depend on it. Cheap computers allow them to access this informantion.
Should all the basic necessities be met before embarking on more advance goals? Following that arguement, we should not be sending people into space before childrens of all races have decent schools to go to. I wonder which came first. Sending a man into space, or allowing kids of different color skin to attend the same schools
"Phone them?"
I know you mean well when you say that, and that it seems stupidly easy, but unfortunately, it's not at all like that. Let's see how that works...
I call India from Vanuatu, which has some of the most expensive long-distance rates in the world. The five minutes I spend on hold will probably cost me the equivalent of national monthly minimum wage. (I'm not exaggerating.)
Then, I say, 'Hey, I'd love to test your product! Where can I get a demo?'
Okay, maybe that wouldn't work; maybe it would be better for me to scare up some donor money and buy one on spec. All I need to do then is to contact them, ask them to fill out an export clearance form, write a note on letterhead, signed by a company officer, and send those to me. Then I take that to the local government offices along with similar forms and letters from my NGO, and ask the government to please allow me to import this equipment without paying the 40% import duty normally charged on computers and the 15% tax paid on everything.
A week later, assuming that the proper government authority isn't on vacation, I can confirm with the Simputer folks that I'm allowed to order one of their computers. They say, 'Fine, just send the payment and we'll ship your computer.'
So I go to the bank and arrange for an international bank draft (this country has no credit cards). The bank draft costs me USD 50 and takes about a week to clear.
Assuming that the transaction doesn't get stopped for any one of dozens of trivial reasons, I then get to arrange for transport of the device. I can't send it by ship, unless I'm willing to wait up to 4 months to receive it. If I send it by courier, it will probably double the price of the device. I'll probably have to find someone in Fiji (which has a large Indian community) who has connections on the subcontinent and who is willing to do me a favour.
So after months of organising and waiting, the device finally arrives. It's impounded at Customs until I purchase three separate clearance forms costing a total of about USD 40. If I take too long getting those forms filled out, I get to pay a storage fee to the folks who run the warehouse.
Finally and at last, I hold the beloved object in my hands. A friend of mine looks at it, his eyes aglow and says, 'Wow! Can I have one?' I think about what I just went through... and burst into tears and collapse.
See, these are some of those neat infrastructure things that people in the developed world don't consider. Your economic system is so evolved that you're not even aware of all this stuff going on in the background. For you, it just works. For the developing world, these are huge hurdles, any one of which could derail the whole undertaking.
So, to restate what I said in grandparent: Until issues of distribution and availability are addressed, things like the Simputer, aimed solely at the developing world, cannot thrive.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
The big selling point of the Simputer is its ruggedness. I can tell you from experience that the death rate in the tropics for standard office technology is extremely high.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Where do they get the information? From Indian initiatives like e-choupal...
The country is gearing up to connect their rural masses. There's still a lot of groundwork being done, but they are definitely moving forward.
One of the coolest features is the decent handwriting recognition software - it also works for I think, at last count, 6 Indian languages. The otehr cool thing is the interface. Clean. Sweet. Just Works (tm).
Seriously. This is IMHO, the biggest cool thing about this machine. Everything is very slickly built, the stylus works completely....etc.
Now about the Windows inter-operability raised by parent. While Windows is the defacto standard, the target audience here is a village person - for whom interoperability may not be the top priority given that he may never have more than one or two of these things. Also - if you're working with the Indian government, like trying to check land-records and so on, you'll find that most of the departments which HAVE some useful information are using Linux. Yes, it's big in India...
The original design began before BE's involvement, but that was merely reengineering and repackaging the Intel Assabet/Neponset reference design for the StrongARM - no great feat of creative engineering. Even today, I can get any number of similar designs developed in Taiwan for a fraction of the cost that it cost to develop the Simputer, and these are all similar adaptations of Intel reference designs.
The only areas that they chose to use their originality in the old Simputer design resulted in fatal blunders - the use of AAA primary batteries, for instance. Any teenaged high-school geek in the US could have observed that it wouldn't work well with AAAs, but that wasn't clear to the designers of the Simputer! Something was obviously very lacking in their system design skills - which isn't surprising, because system design isn't a subject of study in Indian engineering schools.
(And yes, I graduated from the best Indian engineering institute, and I'm also a system designer, but I'm self-taught.)
The simputer has been battle hardned and is currently under trial by the Indian Army as a tactical battlefield computer. It goes by the name SATHI (an acronym). The idea is to have each field unit networked through this device for battle management. Like all things tech, its defence which foots the cost of innovation.
You assumed wrong!! India is now more or less 90 % wired using wireless communication. Even the lower middle class people can afford and do own cell phones. There are atleast 10 cellular companies providing cellphone connection supporting both GSM and CDMA technologies. The rates have become competitive. And there are special cables that one can buy at a nominal price to connect the phone to the computer to connect to internet - that too broad band. More over, you don't have to own a computer to browse the net. You can do it in any of the number of cyber cafes dotting that place.
As far as the failure of simputer is concerned, it is because there is better technology available to the general public at a much lower price. Infact, I read in the newspaper a few months back, of the success of a project where computer access was provided to farmers in various villages across the country by a multinational company - I think it was ITC - which helped them to check the price of seeds online and buy them at a competitive price. Ofcourse the farmers didn't know anything about computers (nor did they care) but the person managing the computer was computer literate who acted as a intermediate between the computer and the farmers. The computer was powered by using solar panels.