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The Failure of the $100 Laptop?
RobertinXinyang writes "MSN's MoneyCentral has an article on the possibility that the $100 laptop project fails to meet its goals, and the potential of the project to harm people in developing nations. The article goes on to liken the project to 'good-natured showboating', and cites the unreality of a family using the glow from the laptop's screen as the only source of light in their hut. Perhaps there are better things to do with our time and money in developing nations?" From the article: "The entire idea may be misguided and counterproductive. At least that's what Stanford journalism lecturer an Africa watcher G. Pascal Zachary thinks. The basic argument is that with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year, so why waste that sum on a laptop? What are they thinking? The fact that these people need electricity more than they need a laptop is only part of the problem. The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."
The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful.
Computer engineers and software developers are just that - they can create software and build computers.
They aren't molecular biologists or doctors or anything like that, so its not taking the mindshare from those kind of folks.
liqbase
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
MSN's MoneyCentral has an article on the possibility that the $100 laptop project fails to meet its goals
Considering that this $100 laptop does not come bundled with a Microsoft OS, we can really expect impartial reporting from MSN.
a family using the glow from the laptop's screen as the only source of light in their hut.
I wonder if this writer has ever been to the third world. This is simply disgusting. Yes sure, everyone in Africa still lives in huts, and Eskimos live in igloos, etc. Careful, you may be eaten by cannibals while you're out there, too! While there still are some few extremely poor indiginous communities who lack even electricity, I doubt they would have any use for a laptop - even as a source of light.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Did they miss that running Vista was not one of the goals?
:(){
Look at the list of countries that have expressed an interest so far:
* Brazil
* Thailand
* Egypt
* United States (specifically the states of Massachusetts and Maine)
* Cambodia
* Dominican Republic
* Costa Rica
* Tunisia
* Argentina
* Venezuela
* Nigeria
* Libya
Firstly, the minority are african, secondly most of them have basic housing and a working power infrastructure. This laptop idea is something that countries come in on when they want to improve education. It is not, and never has been, an alternative to buying food.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Like the countries that has expessed interest in the $100 lappy are not the wretchedly poor but rather those that have basic necessities covered but are not yet industrialized. For them a cheap computer will come in very handy. For people being murdered in Darfur, not so much.
Not everyone can become a success by marketshare and hype alone, and then never deliver the actual promised products. For most of us, failure is just another step towards success. So even if this $100 laptop becomes a failure, it doesn't matter. More exposure towards the poorer countries, more exposure that the Western countries take more money OUT of such countries, than is going in, more exposure to corrupt leaders which makes any sudden fix unattainable, and lots and lots learned from the project, which can result in even cheaper laptops with higher specs.
It's too easy to criticize when someone does good. That to actually do good in this world, you have to fight, and fight, and fight, and fight. And we get stronger every day.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Black and white thinking perceives the economic divide to be so immense that there is no middle ground of lack that can be alleviated. Unable to come up with a grand unified solution to the world poverty problem, they give up and distract themselves with a shiny new mp3 player.
Of course there are many, many people who still don't have access to clean water. Let's put our minds together to work on that problem as well. There's room for our service on all levels of impoverishment.
This article was reported and written by John C. Dvorak for MarketWatch.
How about they give them a free pick-axe and some seeds with every laptop purchase?
That would help, but only if the west would abolish farm subsidies for their own farmers.
OFCOURSE the problem with any project that uses things like computers/radios/video ect... is that its hard to make these programs sustainable. Typical projects have funding for 3-5 years in which time they distribute thousands of the things and then bam! one day the money runs out, the project ends, ... and then what? That is a problem with ALL development projects. The trick is to build sustainability.
Young people in a poor village in Africa are no different than anywhere else, and if you give them access to a networked computer with access to internet the possibilities are endless.
There are many successful projects implementing cell phones to help farmers get better prices for their crops. There are radio shows that teach people about HIV with call in shows using text messaging. The possibilities are endless. The next step is to integrate computers and internet into the matrix.
The truth is, you could probably buy a lot of flour for a single village for $100 for a year-- but once they have eaten it, they will still be hungry. Give a village a cheap device such as the $100 laptop and access to a network, the possibilities to exchange knowledge, generate ideas, and problem solve for THEMSELVES is limitless. This is how you create sustainability. Give them the tools and ideas, the rest can follow.
fed for a day, teach to fish ...
The goal is not to give kids toys. It's to give them the means to explore education.
Obviously "feeding a village" isn't solving the problem, it's just keeping uneducated poor masses alive.
I'd rather educate them so they can help themselves.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"The basic argument is that with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year"
:) )
Ok I am from India so $100 = 4500 Rs, now I would be really delighted to learn how one can feed a village for a year with that much of money. No,I really would like to know...considering the fact that villages in developing countries are genrally big( I can speak for India here, I spend half of my childhood in the most backward region of India,
I really appreciate intelligence of Mr.John C. Dvorak, but wait...
I am brazilian. As such, I've seen that most foreign people simply don't understand the socio-economics of developing countries.
An anedoctal evidence: I have some relatives in Italy, and I visited there once or twice. They live in the most developed and well-fared north, somewhere near Brescia, not too far from Milano. Brescia itself has some 200k habitants, and the city they lived in should have some 20-30k. One night, after showing me around, they asked me (quite seriously) if I was distressed from the "big cities", seeing so many people and cars and so on. I looked back at them nonplused, I suppose. I grew up in Sao Paulo, go look in wikipedia how big is that. But I understand that people from Europe and US mostly believe that all Brazilians live either in huts around the Amazon forest or in very poor "favelas" around Rio de Janeiro, where they can conveniently get dressed up (or down?) for Carnaval. Well, I am not trying to say there is a large percentage of the population in Brazil and other developing countries that is indeed very poor and has not access to technology (a recent survey says around 40% of brazilians never used a computer, and 60% never entered "the Internets"). But most people here have some kind of access to school, however poor and lacking resources they might be, and they are not naive helpless savages as you might guess. People need opportunities to grow. Sending US$100 worth of food to poor people might do some well to those that indeed do not have enough to eat, and I'd urge responsible people to donate (or even better, get engaged in) reliable organizations that do that task. But giving away food won't put the poor people around here, India or Africa in the right way, where they can build a self-sustainable industry and technology to compete with today developed countries. So, either some people are simply ignorant or naive enough to understand this, or perhaps they are beginning to get worried that someday the countries that supply food and raw materials to them today at bargain prices won't be there anymore.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
What lost mind share??? This laptop isn't stealing "mind share" away from other ideas. If other ideas fail it's because no one cares about them. What these people in this article are whining about are that they think that their way is the best, and anyone else not solving the problem their way is wrong. It's just plain bullshit. This isn't a zero sum game... There's a huge portion of the population that isn't even playing or caring. A new idea won't steal mind share, it will bring new players to the table that otherwise wouldn't be interested.
It's like the lame argument that people blame Ralph Nader for stealing votes from the Democrats. Again, bullshit. A good part of the people who voted for Nader didn't want to vote for Gore OR Bush, so without that alternative, they probably wouldn't have voted. It's not Nader for screwing over Gore, it's Gore's fault for not making himself a more viable candidate.
From the article: "And in today's world the real value of a computer is it being networked," says Zachary. "Finding a network in the poor areas is either impossible or very expensive." Obviously, the writer missed the point that these laptops are capable of forming wireless mesh networks in the classroom. Also, Squeak is being bundled with OLPC. See http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2006/11/17/squea k-in-extremadura/ for a nice video about what is already being done with Spanish school children.
The MSN article is completely correct. Everyone knows that people are either poor, and thus live in mud huts with only a single goat to keep them company; or they are rich, in which case they can afford to buy as many computers as they can fit inside their trendy apartments.
The creators of the $100 laptop are under the delusion that wealth is not a binary condition. For some strange reason, they seem to think that there are poor people in this world that have enough money to feed themselves and buy essentials, but not enough money or infrastructure to support buying the latest Pentium from Dell. This is clearly ridiculous, and I applaud MSN Money for reminding us that the world really is black and white (no pun intended, ahem).
A flaw in his thinking is to assume that there is a fixed amount of help available. Another flaw is to assume that the laptop actually costs money. If used as an electronic book, then it substitutes for hundreds of dollars worth of books (over the course of its lifetime). Another flaw is to suggest that all expenditures are the same, blurring the difference between spending for investment and spending for consumption.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Nigeria is also a country with reasonable cashflow - they're one of the largest oil exporters in the world. They also recently finished paying off $10 billions in loans and negotiated debt relief for another $18 billion. The $10 billions were paid off with increases in their oil revenues thanks to the rising oil price, and was paid off as a requisite for the $18 billion in relief. So thanks to the oil price they've got billions more tax revenues AND they've massively cut their interest rate payments.
They are paying for these machines themselves because they think it is useful to improve education, and they can afford a million or two with just a month or two worth of the increased revenues.
It is also a tiny investment compared to what Nigerians themselves are spending on cell phones: Currently there are more than 20 million cellphones (population of 130 million). Practically ALL of those have come in the last 4-5 years, and Nigeria has one of the highest cellphone growth rates in the world - miles ahead of the US for instance - and is rapidly catching up to the cellphone penetration in more developed countries.
Like the people here on Slashdot, everybody got opinions, but nobody DOES ANYTHING.
I dunno. I live here in the third world. I'm a physician. I have passed the US medical licensing exams. I could be in the US, earning over $150,000 a year. Nonetheless here I am in the third world, working twice as hard for about $30k a year. But I feel that I am DOING something. What are YOU doing, exactly?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why does everyone think that every single human being in developing countries lives in mud huts and is starving to death? Reality check: being poor doesn't mean that you're starving to death or that you're living in a mud hut.
There are hundreds of millions of people in those countries that don't starve, but they're far from wealthy enough to afford a computer. A $100 computer could be a help to them, and it introduces them to computing which is a very valuable skill.
Is it so hard to understand?
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
As a French citizen living in the third world (british midlands), I can tell you those people have no idea of what a computer is and how to use it. You'd better send cans of lager beer if you want to do something useful
he eats for a week.
but give him the ability to learn and give him nearly unlimited access to information and knowledge and he can grow crops/produce food/orginize business/etc etc for a life time.
This isn't about solving the problem for a week. A temporary solution at best, training people to depend on foreign aid in the worst, but about empowering people to create real solutions for themselves.
Despite what people want to beleive, that african aid will save the world and make them heroes, the only people in a position to help Africans (and other third world nations) perminately is Africans (and natives to those same third world nations)
That's how it's going to happen. Africans helping Africans. Education and giving people the tools to learn to figure out solutions to their own problems is what is going to solve problems. (that and economic trade)
Not 'mister white european rich guy' coming around every few months and giving handouts of food and vaccinations. THAT is the real feel-good-happy-bullshit. Not saying it's not needed and people shouldn't be doing it. I am saying it's a bandaid, that's all. Your nursing the wounds (which in itself is valuable), not healing them.
And I don't get why people keep complaining that this is a waste of money and they would rather use their money to help those people get food and other types of support. Well there are already programs for that. Why not have another form of help in the area of education and technology. It can run side by side with the people trying to get food and medicine to these underdeveloped countries.
I think this program could help keep kids, as well as adults, somewhat familiar with the idea of computers. If one day their country is pulled out of the 3rd world era, then they won't be completely foreign to technology.
Can I bum a sig?
I work for an NGO in Yemen, and $100 will not feed 4 houses of 5 persons for 2 months in a rural area, much less a village for a year. I cannot believe that such an outrageously inaccurate statement can be made.
Why do people still have this image that all poor people live in mud, and each what little grass they get? Maybe they have little grass skirts and spears? Until the West gets rid of the idea that the majority of the poor in the world have completely nothing, things won't get fixed.
The purpose of the Laptop isn't to be sent to the areas of the world where food and water are the biggest and most desperate needs. They are to be sent to places where most basic needs are taken care of, but the people could use an extra boost to educate themselves and get better jobs and raise themselves out of poverty. The idea that "there are worse problems, so if you don't help with the worst one, then you can't do any good" is one of the most flawed and disgusting ideas. It's the same argument that we shouldn't have gone into space until we feed every person on the planet. Some people have strengths other than giving hygiene kits or delivering rations to starving areas of the world. Why can we not use what we're best at (programming skills) to help out the poor in another way?
May I ask what the writer of this FUD has been doing to help the starving? You shouldn't be wasting your time writing anything, after all -- it's taking time away that you could be donating food to the hypothetical mud-hut-dwelling Africans.
Criticizing a do-gooder on the basis that the critic would prefer to use the do-gooder's resources in a different way is fundamentally flawed. That way lies paralysis and doing nothing. It's just a complicated way of saying "be reasonable--do things my way."
It's like criticizing the space program on the basis that it would be better to use the same resources to fight poverty in the U.S. That point is arguably true, but it's silly, because if we didn't have a space program the political reality is that those resources would not be used to fight poverty.
The altruistic impulse is not fungible. If you say to Negroponte "we don't want your laptops," he's not going to say, "Great, I'll just fold up the Media Lab and send all its funds to Oxfam."
I've faced this problem in deciding how to make personal charitable donations. How can one decide when there are so many worthy causes? How can one justify donating to the American Cancer Society when perhaps the American Heart Association would be a better use of resources? Is it frivolous to donate to the EFF instead of sending that money to UNICEF? The only answer is: these are the charities I donate to, you donate to whatever charities you wish.
Nobody knows how to solve the world's problems. If it were simple and obvious we'd just solve them. The $100 laptop is an interesting idea and it might do some good.
If not, I'd wager the amount of resources and "mind share" it's diverting from anything are utterly negligible compared to, say, the amount of resources and "mind share" being used in the U. S. to launch the PlayStation 3, or fulminate about O. J. Simpson's new book, or pursue the war in Iraq.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Uncle Milty Friedman, the free-market radical, has finally bit the turnip, maybe his execrable idea that the world is a zero-sum game
Umm, the idea of Milton Friedman and other economic liberals is that the world is NOT a zero sum game, which is why the fact that we are wealthy is taking exactly nothing away from people in the third world (who were poor when we were poor, and would still be poor if we became poor again).
If you are going to spout bullshit, at least you could try to not be 100% wrong in the first sentence...
It's unfortunate that Mr. Dvorak didn't talk with the proponents of and contributors to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. He admits he depended on information on a Web site. Normally, this isn't a problem, but...unlike an organization with a for-profit motive with which Mr. Dvorak is used to dealing, there are no PR flacks in this small group of people doing the work. There isn't an army of copywriters keeping the OLPC web site up-to-the-minute. The focus of the OLPC army, about a platoon in strength, is getting the laptop built and distributed, to a price, to a performance level, to a quality level. There are no information officers here.
As a consequence, Mr. Dvorak's factual basis for his opinions appear to be flawed. That's the problem with fast-moving, lean projects that don't have a profit motive: the worker-bees don't budget time to spoon-feed journalists.
I base this critique on the facts shown at a presentation I attended last week on the project and its current status. During that presentation, many of Mr. Dvorak's criticisms were answered in full. I'll run down the factual points, based on the information I gleaned from that presentation. I don't vouch for absolute accuracy, as I wasn't taking notes, and I'm not part of the project. Keeping those caveats in mind:
* Justification: Mr. Dvorak doesn't touch on this issue at all, except in the negative and through the words of another person. He missed the one reason this project is interesting to the governments of the developing nations: it saves money in education.
Mr. Dvorak, have you looked at the price of school textbooks these days? How much does your local school spend, per year, on books for their kids? In developing countries, the textbook cost may be lower than here but it's still high compared to, say, food.
(N.B.: The situation in college is even worse. I leave research on that issue as an exercise to the reader, as most of the hits on Google about textbook pricing focus on higher education.)
You say, Mr. Dvorak, "with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year" but that same $100 doesn't cover educating ONE child for ONE year. You want to fill their stomachs, but starve their brains?
The OLPC project got the facts from the horse's mouth, the governments who have to somehow educate their children in order to raise the standard of living in their country. The cost of the laptop, roughly $20/year for the five-year life of the laptop, is less than the cost of the books needed to teach the kids. Throw in the infrastructure costs (development of electronic textbooks, "libraries", access points and their connections to a country-wide network) and the country still sees a savings.
Interestingly, like most "problems", it comes down to money.
* Manufacturing cost: While the presenter didn't provide a complete bill of materials for the laptop, the cost projections for building the laptop in million quantities falls well below $100 at the current time. Further cost reduction is possible as the laptop matures. The cost projection shown by the presenter was verified by members of the audience who have been on the front lines of manufacturing products like this laptop.
How much lower can the price go? You know as well as anyone the cost curve over lifetime of a computer product. Is $50 possible?
* Maintenance: Photos of the prototypes shown at the presentation show a modular approach very similar to that used by IBM in making the PS/2 Model 50 personal computer (and *not* used in virtually every PC made today). The only tool required to service the machines is a single screwdriver. Kids in the US, UK, Canada, and other developed countries have no problems servicing computers *not* designed to be serviced easily by untrained personnel. So the only infrastructure required is a way to get spare parts to those who need them.
* Networking: The laptops use mesh networking to communicate with each other, and to access points provided as part of the
Financial resources are in no way limited. Economics 101...Some one has to always be in a position to need some thing from some one else for our systems to work. Basically all of them rely on this concept. Why not at least make those we tread on daily (with or without our knowledge) have slightly more meaningful lives and give them one of the best resources around - knowledge.
As far as I'm concerned this is just Microsoft kicking a good project because of the injection of Linux it will bring to the developing world. And don't lie to yourself; if we really wanted to give help to these people we would do more than a token effort - and maybe this is one of those ways.
I ate your fish.
Sure - you can give a village $100 worth of food - and if they ever actually get the food - and if it's not stolen by the local warloads - or the cash skimmed off by some corrupt politician - or eroded by all of the administrative overheads - then they'll be much better off for a year. They'll probably also stop planting crops too. If you keep it up for enough years - they won't even know how to plant crops. What happens the next year and the year after and for the next 100 years?
You could build them a generator - but who will service it? Where will they get gas to power it? OK - make it a windmill - but still, who will fix it when it breaks?
You can go on propping up these failed third world economies by paying 'welfare' - or you can try to fix the root problems and let them support themselves.
In the long term, what these countries need more than anything else is better education. With education, they can pull themselves out of mire that currently drags them down. That's a long term, sustainable, solution. $100 doesn't buy many text books - but it does buy Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg...it gets them keyboard skills. You can sit in a little hut in the middle of a drought blasted desert and so long as you have Internet access, a clockwork laptop and the right skills, you can earn vastly more money than you could ever earn any other way. You can earn enough buy your own generator - or you can learn enough to realise that in your environment, a windmill would be a better choice (or not) - you can learn how to service it. Even if you are a farmer in Kenya - you can learn what the current price of coffee in various markets - you can negotiate prices directly with StarBucks instead of being paid 1% of the value by some sleazy middle-man.
But they can't do that without education and a way to reach out to the outside world.
So - give a man a fish or teach him to fish?
www.sjbaker.org
Seriously?
"The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."
What the hell? Why does he get to say what the people on that project are doing? I have no idea if it will end up being a good idea, and neither does he. All I know is that the amount that I was able to learn on a given day became basically unbounded on the day that my family got their first computer, and it's probably been the single most important learning tool I've ever used. That's why I became a programmer. That and because I get to make a lot of money for very little effort.
Still. This complaint is that the people making the OLPC could be doing something better. This coming from a guy who's spent HIS mindshare in life writing a bunch of occasionally-pointed articles (yeah, that's going to provide electricity more quickly, good thinking). It's easy to complain.
Now if it weren't Dvorak complaining - if my idol, Paul Graham, came out talking about how bad of an idea it was - I'd at least start to examine it. But if I listened every time Dvorak said something, I'd end up quite the idiot.
The economy will tell us whether this is a good idea. Not immediately, and it'll be an interesting example of a quasi-free market, since the only people involved in the market are about forty potential governments. Still, time will tell a lot better than MarketWatch.
-knewter
Why not at least make those we tread on daily (with or without our knowledge) have slightly more meaningful lives and give them one of the best resources around - knowledge.
..." saying.
Actually, there's a straightforward answer to such rhetorical questions. Much of the explanation for the abject poverty in many parts of the world is a local social/political system that keeps the people in poverty. And the main tool for doing this is ignorance. People in power tend to understand the old "Knowledge is power" saying, and maintain their hold by blocking general access to information from the outside world.
Those who object to the OLPC project are basically arguing for keeping the people in ignorance by maintaining their lack of access to knowledge.
Granted, people need food, shelter, medicine, etc. Giving such things does help them in the short term. But unless you can also fight the local power structure by giving the people access to information and knowledge, your charity is only short-term, and doesn't address the underlying problems. It's the old "Give a man a fish
Of course, the OLPC laptop isn't itself a total solution. It also needs the infrastructure to deliver information. Unless it is accompanied by the hardware needed for Net access, it won't accomplish nearly its full potential. So rather than discussing why we should give the people food and medicine, which existing relief organizations know how to do, we computer geeks should be discussing how we can also bring them Internet connectivity.
Along with the (linux-based) OLPC laptops, with their wireless mesh comm hardware, we need to find the local proto-geeks and supply them with (linux-based?) server machines that can function as gateways. And we need to figure out how to link those servers to the Internet. The best way would be to do what we can to help those local geeks manage it all themselves.
If we can pull this off, the local power structures won't know what hit them until it's too late. This is happening in places like China right now, where the local powers are fighting their rearguard actions against the likes of google and wikipedia, in the ongoing battle to keep their people ignorant. With a bit of effort, we can bring this to the rest of the world.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
the people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful.
This is the guns vs butter economics analogy. Like it, this argument is flawed. As cows can't make guns, most hackers aren't equiped to solve the hunger problem in poor villages.
Although I don't disagree that hunger is a greater problem than the lack of information technology, to say that work on both uses the same scarce resources, is perhaps a stretch.
I have doubts about this project of my own - in sufficient volume, the real cost of books is about $2 each, so you're trading 50 books for the gadget; but there's just no question that while some places could use 50 almost infinitely rugged (by comparison) books more than a laptop, there are also many, many places that could use the laptop.
2 0article_%20%20Human%20Development.txt
A very small percentage of the world is actually unable to feed itself - and which percentage keeps shifting, that's more about drought, war and other temporary emergencies than a permanent condition.
Required reading is this very sharp, short column by historian / columnist Gwynne Dyer:
http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%
We are constantly bombarded with the comparison between our own wealthy fifth of the world and the poorest fifth, most of them in Africa. In the above column, he reminds us that most of Africa had a fairly good standard of living as recently as the 60s and has declined in recent decades because of apalling governments, not "natural" problems like more people than the land can feed.
And the "middle three-fifths" of humanity are a success story, recently - China and India get the press for their economic rise because they are so large, but all over the world (Dyer writes the above from Turkey) people of this generation have risen from subsistence to a level of comfort that most of our grandparents would recognise - or even envy. (See the series "1900 house" to realize how far we've come since our grandparents day.) That middle 3/5ths don't need the laptop for light, they have food, clothing, shelter, some light and water at least at the end of the street. What they need are opportunities to earn more cash so they can get water to the house and sewer that isn't the gutter.
Three-fifths of six billion is quite a "market". And the sooner they migrate up from $10/day to $50, the sooner we'll have *help* with the tough problem of the poorest fifth. Reviewing the recent economic changes, there's no reason to imagine this can't happen in a generation.