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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
This article was reported and written by John C. Dvorak for MarketWatch.
"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?
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).
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!
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.