Companies Compete to Save the World June 14, 2010
One Laptop Per Child Gave Us the Netbook - Now This
The 1/18/10 edition of Forbes magazine has a nice article on Nicholas Negroponte, the man and mind behind the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) non-profit organization. You know the one …. they were going to create the $100 laptop for educational purposes in impoverished third-world countries. The problem is, the laptop ended up costing $188 and with 1.4 million shipped so far it is only 20% of the way to its 7 million-unit projection and losing steam fast.
But Negroponte is a visionary and one has to look at this situation not as a failure but as a created opportunity for the world. Mega-giant Intel was once a partner of OLPC, then became a competitor and created the Classmate - which is similar to the OLPC model called the XO. Two million units of the Classmate have been shipped so far. As Mary Lou Jepsen, one of the designers of the original XO states, “Go ahead. Compete with us to save the world.” I guess competition isn’t such a bad thing.
Let’s consider what else has happened as a result of the push for the small $100 laptop. The XO didn’t hit it’s original price target of $100, but it did prompt a clump of good-things-in-small-packages PCs built by Intel, Asus, HP, Dell and just about everyone else. All were trying to jump on the “netbook” wave and we’ve all been benefiting from this new niche laptop market ever since.
Negroponte’s next vision is for a $75 computer. By 2012 he’s shooting for a touchscreen tablet PC for low-income school children that will use less power than a small light bulb and will be unbreakable, waterproof, and half as thick as an iPhone. $75. Says Negroponte, “Essentially, we want it to be a single sheet of plastic. No holes, no moving parts. We want it to be so simple that it hardly has a design.” For skeptics, Negroponte argues that he doesn’t necessarily need to build it. “We’re at a stage now where we just have to threaten to build it,” says Negroponte.
And the rest of the industry will create their own competition to make it happen….
