the Onda

A long time ago in a faraway blog, I spent some time arguing that providing really cheap computers would have a really positive impact on society. Fast forward a year when at the Wall Street Journal's D4 conference Nicholas Negroponte got up and talked about the $100 PC for poor countries and I wrote that it seemed silly that he was spending all of this alpha geek energy designing something from scratch when there were plenty of cheap components that could be used to get mighty close to the price target. Well it's been a year, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative has made good progress, and I guess it's time to color me wrong.

What I had not realized was how brainwashed I was by existing form factors in PCs/laptops, and how much innovation could truly be achieved by starting from scratch and designing the hardware so that it hit the right price/features/performance point. And to boot, getting luminaries like Alan Kay (and even Python's very own GvR because as it turns out a bunch of the GUI has been wrapped for quick dev. with Python) involved has definitely been good for the project, and I didn't realize just how many would jump on board.

But actually, outside of the progress that they've made in one short year, the thing that has most convinced me that going with a brand new hardware platform was the key was getting a Nintendo DS Lite, essentially a portable game player with a lot of clever design in it and the unbelievable price tag of $129 (for a computer with two displays, enough processing power to run a number of fun games and a wireless radio in it). Now I know we're supposed to think that all game manufacturers do the "blades and razors" thing and give away the console in order to make it up with the games, but I seriously doubt that Nintendo is really losing much money on every DS-Lite. And seeing it run for hours on a charge, dropping it several times on hard surfaces with no serious effect, and most significantly seeing how the most clever of games uses innovative input methods to enable gameplay (a graffiti-like character recognizer and even better, a microphone), that made me think of the $100 laptop again, and the promise that it could bring.

I still have my doubts as far as OLPC goes. Despite a seemingly well thought-out process for building software, and the aforementioned software gurus, I worry that the apps on it may stink. I worry that there may be hardware/software integration issues that require the concentration and effort of a single product management organization making trade-offs and compromises in the right direction. Perhpas now that these guys have been outed as being a world-class hardware manufacturer, maybe they could jump in and try to help?

But I do have to give it to Negroponte for thinking big, and getting out there to sell it big as well.

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