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The True Cost of One Laptop Per Child
An anonymous reader writes "The '$100 laptop' Negroponte is hoping to put in the hands of millions of kids in developing nations may actually be more like the '$900 laptop.' From the article, 'Jon Camfield says...once maintenance, training, Internet connectivity, and other factors are taken into account, the actual cost of each laptop rises to more than $970. This, he says, doesn't even take in to account the additional costs associated with theft, loss, or accidental damage. Camfield contends that such an expensive undertaking should at least be field-tested in pilot programs designed to establish the viability of the project before asking countries to invest millions, or perhaps billions, of dollars.'" Newsforge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
In this case, I wonder if it's to discredit the whole idea, or to inflate the perception of the price so Wintel can compete.
(shrug)
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The "fine" article says
Training?... Uhh, we are talking about poor people here that would _never_ have a computer let alone training. This is not some stupid business expense that we can write off or do some MS-Magic(tm) and make it look like an MS-Solution(tm) would cost less. We are talking about humans that will get a pretty cheap laptop and will... you know... put in the time to learn what they have been given. We are not talking about "rich" Americans or Europeans where having a computer is expected. These laptops are going to people that would never have a laptop... ever.
It is pretty sick to me that some business idiot would try to justify costs going by typical business expenses.
I know what is coming next. Some MS-Study(tm) will show how the OLPC will be more "cost effective" if Microsoft were paid their fees instead of using Linux.
OLPC is pretty cool. I hope they succeed and do well. I hope the corporate greed of MS doesn't get in the way. However, with the recent activity of MS with regards to the OLPC, MS has their sites set on getting a piece of the pie. That can only mean corporate greed will take over the project and poor kids around the world will suffer because of it.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
On behalf of people here in the developing world, I'd like to thank you for having a brain. 8^)
People in my region are currently negotiating for access to the OLPC project, and you can bet your booties that economic spin-offs are one of the top reasons for the IT community supporting this effort. Just about everyone in the private sector likes the idea expressly because of the fact that these things will require support.
The way costs are expressed in this article are extremely disingenuous. The $30 Billion price tag, for example, is assumed to be a monolithic extra cost that would unquestionably have to be borrowed, because, apparently, heaven forbid that a nation like China actually allocate some of the largest cash reserves in the world to this project. Likewise, I'm not sure how this would cause Brasil, India or even Thailand to break out the begging bowl.
Likewise, why is this investment in infrastructure not compared to the huge investments in basic infrastructure that every single developed nation in the world has made - and continues to make? Perish the thought that a developing nation might see the benefit of following the example of every single successful country in the world. Anyone care to make a similar holistic calculation of how much the US, Canada and Western Europe have invested to introduce computers into the classroom?
Sounds to me like the author slept through economics 101 class. Or like FUD, depending on what you consider the author's motive to be. Whatever this is, it is not science, and it's not logic.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
You are correct. Unfortunately, most people can't see the benefit of that in itself. They think you have to have uniform literacy and mass usage right away to have benefits, which is an unnecessary and probably unreachable goal.
A much more likely outcome is that organized training efforts will achieve very little before the money runs out. The first generation of users will be smart kids with free time. They will be eager but clumsy proselytizers, and their efforts will enable a certain level of usage in local schools and governments. That kind of organic growth is inevitably unpredictable and unequal, and it will leave people out. (There are people who would oppose the program on these grounds, but they are exactly the same people who can't imagine that there will be any benefits not doled out directly through official training programs, so no worries.)
The organizations that do this kind of cost assessment (like the one leading to $970/laptop) are corporations and public schools, which depend on command and control and only value results that are uniform and reproducible. The uniform and reproducible results, in my opinion, will be nada, and the program will be declared a failure. Meanwhile, a talented, free-time-having minority will become hackers and amateur sysadmins, and their existence will provide a foundation for future developments that we can't predict.
Yes the information ala 'total cost of ownership' is correct. However the article puts forth this info as if these costs were unique to the 100 dollar laptop and wouldn't apply to a 600 dollar laptop. This is equivalent to saying that my car priced on the lot was 4 times the 24,000 I paid for it and goes up in cost annually at the rate of 10,000 dollars a year. (gas, oil, insurance, repairs and taxes)
Given this path of logic the faster, you sell you car the lower the cost. right? The more expensive the car is when you buy it the more money you don't loose by selling it fast. The cost of the laptop is 100 dollars. At no time do I recall them claiming that they would lower the cost of ownership, replacement and or repair. The author of the article needs to go back to school to learn on thing.
Logic no matter how meticulously applied is still false if the opening assumption is wrong.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Nah, that's all part of the plan. The plan to insert deceptively cheap laptops in the hands of millions of children not currently in the market for Internet, training, maintenance or other digital services, because they're busy hunting/gathering (sometimes at the dump), or even running from genocidal militias. But once hooked on the PC/Net, they'll even go without food to consume more digital services. And become available as oursource personnel, once India's educated caste saturates and the "developing" world itself needs to outsource to even cheaper labor.
The Earth's "GPP" (Gross Planetary Product) is about $36T:y in impossible accounting (who would buy all of it from all of us?) With about 6B people. That's average annual productivity of about $6K:y. Since the poorer 50% of humans own only 1% of the world's wealth, though income is not quite as inequitable, the OLPC kids' parents probably make less than $600:y, leaving maybe $100:y to spend on each kid, tops. So needing $1000 to spend on a laptop that will last maybe 5 years means those kids will consume twice as much just with the new toy. So naturally they'll start producing more, according to well established capitalist laws of supply and demand.
That is, if the kids don't eat the laptop first.
--
make install -not war
You cannot look at this problem through the eyes of a western businessman. You see a computer, you see a person who does not know how to use it, and as a result you see need for training, user manuals, instructors, etc. It doesn't have to be that way:
I grew up in a communist country in the 70's and early 80's. The only computers we had (by we I mean the public, not the government) were donated to us from the west. Weth very few exceptions they came wit no instructions, no manuals, often with very little software. So we learned how to use them. We figured it out. I know people who learned how to program by reading printouts of programs they found somewhere on a floppy with software that happened to have come with a source, and tried to figure out what the program actually does, without even knowing much English. We did have some manuals and books, mostly old editions, also donated, and we circulated these around. Not everybody was able to do that, but there were plenty of us whe could. And believe me that we would be pretty upset if at that time somebody in the west said: "Don't send them computers, they won't be able to use them without having proper trainig and infrastructure."
AccountKiller
Education is probably the best defense against what you describe. I've seen both sides.
I think you may be guilty of what the grandparent was calling hand waving. As described earlier in the thread, crime is a pyramid. Once you rise above the very base level(s) you will find educated people. Crime is not about education, it is often really simple economics (as in microeconomics, how an individual allocates finite resources, time, money, goods, etc). What is the least expensive way that I can satisfy a need or desire? If the risk of being caught committing a crime is low enough, and/or if the repercussion are minor enough, then a criminal action may be the less expensive route. There is also a component regarding the ability to exercise power, which may be a need/desire itself rather then a means to an end. Of course exercising power comes in both legal and illegal forms. Those who are more frequently able to exercise it on the legal side might have a slightly lower barrier to exercising it on the illegal side.
Education is subservient to the political and economic environments. If you have a disfunctional government or economy you will have educated people engaging in crime. The grandparent was correct, the government and economy have to be fixed first. If you look beyond the small scale that you have observed you will find very well educated populations breaking the law, witness the tail end of the soviet bloc and the aftermath. Also witness Iraq, it had one of the best educated populations for the region and these people were unable to correct a disfunctional government or economy.
You know, I'm going to have to start linking this article in every OLPC thread, just to shut people making arguments like yours up.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Wow, that's a whopper. Because according to Eben Moglen:
(Go to 41:54 in the video. Downloadable version also available.)
The rest of his presentation is fantastic, BTW.