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."

Comments

Sad News

[fembots]

My sympathy goes to them for failing twice.

I wonder if they did have market research to identify the need? You can't just build and hope they will come anymore.

This reminds me of a joke where a group of settlers came to this island and gifted the chief some pet gold fish as a gesture of good faith, but the chief just ate all the them.

Again?

[monkeySauce]

You mean after 11 days this thing has again failed to win over the Indian market?
Maybe they should set slightly more long-term targets.

I'd rather have MIT's $100 Laptop

[davidwr]

Assuming I can wait that is.

If I'm in the third world, I can probably wait.

What Happened to Simputer?

[anomav]

200 USD ~ 8600 Indian Rupees There is not money for some people even to feed themselves and heir children ... How would they buy computers ?

Re:What Happened to Simputer?

[Omkar]

I believe the idea was that a whole village would purchase one together, or that some governing body would give them funds to do so. That way the village could have much easier access to information about market conditions, weather, etc. I'm not sure if the villagers ended up getting access to the Net after all (having lived in India for a while, I would guess not), but the Simputer project didn't fail because its cost was all that high. As I understand it, it failed because its competitors decreased their prices much more quickly than it could keep up.

What's the deal?

[Delphix]

What's the deal with these low cost computers over the last few years. First the simputer for poor rural farmers in India that only cost about a year's salary. And more recently the $100 laptop coming out of MIT.

How about we really do something with technology to help these people? Like setting them up with running water, electricity, a house that doesn't leak? Maybe get them enough food or decent medical care... It seems like a waste to invest so much in giving out low cost computers to someone at risk of starving to death the next day or is at high risk of deadly illnesses.

It's a nice goal to have everyone connected. But you have to ask "why?" Are we trying to find a new source of ideas to exploit? I don't see how hooking people up to the net is going to help them out when their basic needs aren't met...

There's the education argument. I'm not sure whether these will provide more access to information. In certain areas it definitely will. But then what do you do with that education when you have no infrastructure to support it... I know it's slashdot and it's all about tech, but hwo about focusing on some tech that would really help people.

Re:What's the deal?

[JoeMerchant]

Well, for starters, if a poor village of 100 people can afford just one of these Simputers and a couple of info-CDs, they can have the equivalent of a small library, with reference material on construction, farming, basic medical care, etc.

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.

Re:What's the deal?

[fm6]

We've had this discussion on Slashdot any number of times, but it never seems to register. I'll try once more.

Yes, most people in India can't afford to buy gadgets. That doesn't mean they can't use them. This is happening already in India and elsewhere in South Asia. The gadget -- a cell phone, a internet-capable computer, whatever -- is purchased by a entrepreneur who resells its use. Or by a group of locals who pool their resources. The gadget pays for itself because these people are desperately poor. They use it to sidestep middlemen so as to get better prices for their crops. Or to obtain weather reports off off the web, so they know the best and safest time to send their fishing boats out. Somebody has a sick cow, goes online for help, and a volunteer vet hundreds of miles away gives them advice.

It's called the Leapfrog Effect. Developing countries don't have all the fancy resources we take for granted, and can't afford to reproduce every step we've taken. So they skip steps. They don't have landline telephones, but they do have cell towers and satellite uplinks. They don't have a decent mail system, but they do have internet access. They don't have newspapers (or the ability to read them), but they do have TV.

That said, they're probably better served by off-the-shelf tech then by specially developed stuff like the Simputer. In theory, the Simputer is easier to use and maintain than a PC -- a major consideration when you're hundreds of miles from the nearest computer store. But that doesn't make up for the extra cost of developing and manufacturing that special gadget.

Re:What's the deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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 ......

Re:What's the deal?

[hey!]

How does a poor farmer who has a little spare land to grow a cash crop figure out what the most profitable choice would be?

Where does a rural mother without ready access to health care find out how to prevent and recognize childhood diseases?

Where does a community leader get information on how to deal with the problem of contaminated water supplies, and how to build emergency filtration systems?

Clearly, information is an important even to poor people. It's not that information is more important than clean water -- that's not true even here in the US. But the marginal value of a dollar spent on information may in some cases be greater than the marginal value spent on all the important things you mention, especially if the technology can be made cheap enough.

Re:What's the deal?

[Quixote]

Sigh... once again: India is a big country, with a population of over a billion. Not everyone in India is running around in tattered clothes, hungry and starving to death.

Even if 20% of the people can afford the Simputer, you are still looking at a market of over 200 million; a market roughly the size of the USA.

Please, use some of your fancy 'Intarweb skilz' to learn more about that country. Learn about things like PPP (purchasing power parity) and the fact that India is a net exporter of food. Even if India didn't produce a single grain of food, their stocks would last 3 years. India is also the world's largest producer of dairy products.

In general, thanks to the culture there, people can survive with the most minimal of resources. If cows can run around on the streets and eke out an existence, don't you think people can? And I'm talking about the worstcase scenario here.

Re:What's the deal?

[Neopoleon]

"India is a net exporter of food. Even if India didn't produce a single grain of food, their stocks would last 3 years."

That doesn't mean a thing.

The French are net exporters of soap, but how many of them actually get a chance to use it?

Re:WTF?

[starwed]

Even the comments are dupes. ^_^

Old story

[fm6]

If you follow the links far enough, you find this story from 2003 that makes it clear that the Simputer has been in trouble for a long time now. (Even before we first took notice of it on Slashdot!) The reason is simple: it costs almost as much as a low-end PC.

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.

Alternatives have more attractive free software

[atomic noodle]

Linux-based systems like the Simputer have a problem competing against Windows/x86 machines in third world markets. The problem is that Windows-compatible software is effectively free, due to piracy. And, even if it isn't strongly marketed locally, that software is made more attractive by all the money spent promoting it elsewhere. (And, this is a dupe, too. The Linux Devices story even links to the same AP article as the original Slashdot posting.)

Re:Alternatives have more attractive free software

[rathehun]

Having actually used the Simputer - one of the hardware engineers is a good friend - I must say that the device itself is quite cool. I also own a Palm Tree 6500, and even when compared to that, it is quite an interesting machine.

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...

Re:WTF?

[Omkar]

Yay for duplicated comments! Never complain about the editors again.

$100?

[Paris The Pirate]

For a about $50 you could get a 486 laptop with a distro of some for of *nix on it. Hell, enterprise chuck out laptop's all the time. Why doesn't someone just recondition them and then palm them off to India at cost if they really wanna help people out there?

Seriously, $100... why, when you could probably organise computers for India for free with a little international logistics and som..... wait...

Actually scratch all that I just remembered we are capitalists. Silly me.

Re:$100?

[grcumb]

"Seriously, $100... why, when you could probably organise computers for India for free with a little international logistics and som..... wait..."

"Actually scratch all that I just remembered we are capitalists. Silly me."

Oh boy, does that ever strike a chord for me. I just ranted about how hard it is to get decent equipment in the developing world last weekend.

Honestly, the big problem is not whether people would actually buy such a device, but how they would go about buying one. You see, shopping online is not an option if you're not online(!). Nor are there handy factory outlet stores in the places where these things are most useful. Governments do some things very well; one of those things is business and/or technology development. They generally don't know jack****, however, about little details like sales channels and marketing.

If I could get in touch with a supplier of these (or any similar competing device), I'd order a dozen right now. I'd easily be able to sell them on my next trip into the villages.

Re:$100?

[kabz]

If it would be so easy to sell these in the villages, then why aren't enterprising people selling Visors, Palms, and equivalently powerful, web and communication oriented small form factor PCs to India already ?

This really is a serious question. A Palm V will do dialup, and more modern and now cheaper devices do WiFi, BlueTooth, ethernet.

Why did they need the Simputer, when there are already similar devices that would work ?

Re:$100?

[grcumb]

"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.

Quite Surprising really

[l0ungeb0y]

Practically impossible to imagine that the impoverished and illiterate of India wouldn't be lining up in droves to fork over years worth of wages for something as technologically underwhelming as the simputer.

It's a shame really, I nearly cry at the loss of productivity they never realized by using spreadsheets to better manage their goat hearding.

I'm not surprised....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really not surprised this wasn't a success. A lot of companies blindly go after "emerging markets" without really understanding them. In particular, price isn't as big of a deal as some people think it is. For example, people vastly underestimate the buying power of people in India. Even if everyone was able to afford a computer, what would they do with them? They have no training, no experience, and no support infrastructure.

Interestingly enough, there are some business models that work well. Take the "village PC" model. One person in the village buys a computer (possibly with village assets), supports it, rents out time on it, etc. Everyone in the village, regardless of their technical expertise, benefits from the technology. This model has also worked well for mobile phones.

Last quarter, there were two good talks on technology for emerging and "invisible" markets here at the University of Washington. The first is a talk by Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley) entitled The Case for Technology for Developing Regions. An abstract, video, and MP3 of the talk are available from that site. The other talk was given by John Sherry of Intel's People and Practices Research Group. PowerPoint slides, an abstract, a suggested reading list, a discussion wiki, and more. I highly encourage you to check these talks out.

Not a very good testimony for conservatism then

[hey!]

Your factual accuracy would make a Fox news commentator blush.

The simputer is being funded by private capital. I've even met some of the people bankrolling it. Those rich Indian guys spend a lot of time dreaming up creative ways to make money. But most ideas like this are going to fail. It's not a "boondoggle", and entrepreneurship.

Ass-Backwards Economics...

[RexRhino]

OK, let me explain something.

When a product is first developed, that research and development cost, tooling costs, etc., need to be recouped. It is passed on to the consumers when a product is new. After a product has been on the market and recoups those costs, they prices start going down.

In effect, those rich geeks who buy all the fancy toys before everyone else subsidize the development for us poor geeks who purchase the product a few years later for next to nothing.

Making a computer especially for poor people makes no sense. Everyone knows that the killer PDAs of today will be available as $50 knockoffs from China in 2 or 3 years. I have seen old Palm PDAs people were trying to get rid of for $10-$15 bucks.

Re:What was the punchline?

[Alien Being]

"gift" is too a verb....

It's the verb that keeps on verbing.

ObFuturama

[Saint Stephen]

I think it was replaced by Femputer.

Can't make 'em cheaper?

[crottsma]

Fry's Electronics (electronic store chain based in California) has been making wonderfully crappy 199.00 dollar computers for years! They run Linux, and are cost-efficient in every respect. Are these other people aiming for a massive profit margin, or are they just unable to replicate the technical efficiency of the local computer-monger?

The whole concept is misguided.

[j741]

Of course it was destined to fail. How can anyone expect verry low-income households, no matter where they are located, to purchase something for which they do not have a need? A computer is a luxury, not a need. It's a tool which enables more complex informational tasks. Those with verry low-income households typically only need simple informational tasks such as word-of-mouth, basic telephone communications, and basic news delivery (currently via radio, newspaper, or TV). Other than providing an alternative method for these tasks, what does a simple computer provide?

And what about longevity and stability? Let's face it, a 20 or 30 year old car can still be useful if it works, but a 4 year old computer is almost useless even for today's simplest computing tasks. Just look at how much the computer industry and social utiliziation has changed in the past few years as related to internet access alone; Broadband, VOIP, P2P, streaming video, these things are still in a massive state of fluctuation as they experience 'growing pains'. Until the 'evolution' of the computer and the way it is used matures and stabilises the appeal of it to those with very few resources is almost non-existant.

Way OT

[rathehun]

i was a volunteer for the last three months with Oxfam India, in Cuddalore, one of the affected districts of South India.

As part of our rehabilitation efforts, we set up Information Centres, using $700 laptops donated by IBM and CDMA based wireless telephones.

These Information Centres contained a large amount of daily updated information - News, Commodity and Vegetable prices, weather information and forecasts, fish prices, government schemes and subsidies that people were eligible for...

We trained local village women to use these machines - aside:our information centre was coded with XUL and therefore, Firefox, hehe - and they earned a small amount of money from printing out say - a governemnt subsidy application form.

Now - and here is where I get to the actual crux of my arguemnet, the price of technology is not the only limiting factor. Just because something costs less than $200 doesn't mean that people WILL buy it. The content - or the usefuleness of the software will ultimately be the driving force behind its adoption. Once people saw that our product was actually useful, they actually raised nearly half the cost of another machine so that there queries could be dealt with faster!

Otherwise you're just giving them an expensive solitare toy.

It would be better

[Relyt]

It would be better if people would just donate unused computers to these countries. I'm sure the libraries and educational institutions would appreciate them, and they would be free.

Is there a charity that does this?