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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.
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 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
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