Cheap, Cheaper, Nicholas

Nicholas Negroponte is fairly known man in the IT business, but perhaps not so among the regular people. He is currently on the board at Motorola, has written the best seller “Being Digital”, founded the medie lab at MIT and launched the famous news site “Wired“.

Then what is it that is suppose to be cheap? A laptop, primarily for kids in third world countries. The aim is to be able to offer the kids the chance of working with computers, and that it will work as a substitution for literature, as books are quite rare and expensive. But to be able to reach this “market” he needs to be able to offer the laptop a bit cheaper than the local store on a sellout. Which he actually seem to have managed, or what would you say about laptop that costs below $100?

Of course you have to get rid of quite a lot of features to reach that price, but it is very unlikely that the target users cares whether they use Linux instead of Windows. They will also use a projection screen instead of a regular flat screen. This doesn’t seem like anything that would interest a regular user, but as Nicholas himself says this is no product that is meant to compeat with other laptops from e.g. HP, Dell etc.

The goal is to distribute 200 miljon computers as early as 2006 and that it will revolutionize the computer use in the third world. We’ll just have to wait and se how things work out for Nicholas, the cause is at least noble.

Source: BBC