There was a lot of fuss over the $100 notebook computer proposed by MIT as the salvation of the third world. I suspect that much of it had to do with its bright green color, because other, uglier-looking $100 laptop proposals haven't received as much attention.
(It's like my teenage daughters said, watching Cinderella: "The moral of this story is that beautiful girls win, and ugly girls lose.")
Over at the Fonly Institute, Lee Felsenstein does some thinking about Problems with the $100 laptop. Sample quote:
"...no studies are being done among the target user populations to verify the concepts of the hardware, software and cultural constructs. Despite the fact that neither the children, their schools nor their parents will have anything to say in the creation of the design, large orders of multi-million units are planned."
Can you image a recall due to faulty electronics or (more likely) culturally-insensitive software? And what I want to know is, where is the electricity coming from to run these millions of computers?
I think a far better idea is to provide Web-enabled cell phone systems, as a starter boost to these un-economies.
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