Monday, July 23, 2007
What $100 can do that many $1000's can't
I was struck while reading an excellent rundown of the $100 laptop how ingenious and intelligent most of its features really are. While I have read about the $100 laptop and had a little laugh that in fact it cost $170-something, I hadn't taken a hard look at its many features and innovations.
It makes me wonder: How many of our favorite stories about american ingenuity are really tales of abundance, luck and affluence? Franklin was handy, the space race was amazing, Wibur and Orville Wright certainly made great leaps, and Edison was phenomenal... but how many of our country's most impressive accomplishments were achieved on a super-tight budget with the poorest as our audience? Very very few? How many of our achievements are meant to operate by the uninformed or are going to be constrained by power shortages? None that I know of. How many of our great innovations are meant to be used in some of the roughest and most unforgiving environments we know of - in a rowdy schoolroom in the poorest of neighborhoods?
Damned few of our accomplishments even attempt what the $100 laptop effort is considering - let alone partially succeed, which the laptop program seems poised to do.
Here are some of the features that popped out at me and I began to wonder, how come there isn't a way for me to spend thousands and get these features? The answer is that these innovations would never have been considered in any upmarket product, it is only within the constraints of a down-market customer-base that these kinds of innovations become a logistical necessity. And necessity, as we know, is the mother of invention.
The interface itself is a bit of a wonder, I haven't used it (you can run it in emulation mode, I haven't had the courage yet), but it appears to be quite exciting. Based on linux, developed in association with Pentagram and Red Hat, a OS called SUGER has been developed who's central metaphor is not windows/desktop based. Instead of programs or software there are activities, instead of files there are objects. Most of the programs -I am sorry- activities, center around things that children might be doing anyway, such as reading, writing, drawing, making music, etc.
The iconic interface is apparently quite intuitive and impressively deep for those children who wish to go down under the surface and examine the code.
The challengingly idealistic theme of "Love is a better master than duty" has driven the feature set of the laptop. Foremost among the themes is the idea that this is not a tool that should necessarily be for instructing so much as be for exploring and expressing.
The laptop has been test dropped from 5 ft and it survived wonderfully, it has been dunked in water for 10 minutes with no obvious effect. The entire thing is about half the weight of a normal laptop and it is made to be decorated so that each child can identify their own. There are also holes on it for scarves, belts or straps so that it can slung over the shoulder and carried for long distances.
The sealed keyboard is child-sized and relatively impervious to spillage, dust or even the occasional hammer.
The "rabbit ears" mesh network allows a computer to immediately establish a network with the computers around it (ever try this with windows vista?) and if 1 computer is within 2km of another computer with internet access, it can share that access (with some decrease in bandwidth).
The laptop has no moving parts so that nothing will break. It has flash memory instead of a harddrive, and no disk drive to let in the sand.
Numerous power sources have been provided, including a solar adapter and my favorite, this yo-yo-like pull string recharger, which runs the laptop for 10 minutes per 1 minute of pulling. Additionally, the screen is super low-power and the cpu goes immediately into power-saving mode when unused.
The message here is probably no surprise to devotees of Prahalad, who's book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits" basically makes the same point: there are tons of profit to be made by going down-market both because that market is fantastically large, but also because the process of going down-market requires extreme ingenuity which can be re-purposed at every level of the company.
Overall, I suppose I am asking a simple question: isn't there a time when cheaper is actually much much better? Aren't there constraints with enrich as well as impoverish, and isn't the prospect of expanding your market to a group who until now couldn't even consider your product an enticing prospect?
BBC's excellent description of the $100 laptop.
Damned few of our accomplishments even attempt what the $100 laptop effort is considering - let alone partially succeed, which the laptop program seems poised to do.
Here are some of the features that popped out at me and I began to wonder, how come there isn't a way for me to spend thousands and get these features? The answer is that these innovations would never have been considered in any upmarket product, it is only within the constraints of a down-market customer-base that these kinds of innovations become a logistical necessity. And necessity, as we know, is the mother of invention.
The interface itself is a bit of a wonder, I haven't used it (you can run it in emulation mode, I haven't had the courage yet), but it appears to be quite exciting. Based on linux, developed in association with Pentagram and Red Hat, a OS called SUGER has been developed who's central metaphor is not windows/desktop based. Instead of programs or software there are activities, instead of files there are objects. Most of the programs -I am sorry- activities, center around things that children might be doing anyway, such as reading, writing, drawing, making music, etc.
The iconic interface is apparently quite intuitive and impressively deep for those children who wish to go down under the surface and examine the code.
The challengingly idealistic theme of "Love is a better master than duty" has driven the feature set of the laptop. Foremost among the themes is the idea that this is not a tool that should necessarily be for instructing so much as be for exploring and expressing.
The laptop has been test dropped from 5 ft and it survived wonderfully, it has been dunked in water for 10 minutes with no obvious effect. The entire thing is about half the weight of a normal laptop and it is made to be decorated so that each child can identify their own. There are also holes on it for scarves, belts or straps so that it can slung over the shoulder and carried for long distances.
The "rabbit ears" mesh network allows a computer to immediately establish a network with the computers around it (ever try this with windows vista?) and if 1 computer is within 2km of another computer with internet access, it can share that access (with some decrease in bandwidth).
The laptop has no moving parts so that nothing will break. It has flash memory instead of a harddrive, and no disk drive to let in the sand.
Numerous power sources have been provided, including a solar adapter and my favorite, this yo-yo-like pull string recharger, which runs the laptop for 10 minutes per 1 minute of pulling. Additionally, the screen is super low-power and the cpu goes immediately into power-saving mode when unused.
The message here is probably no surprise to devotees of Prahalad, who's book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits" basically makes the same point: there are tons of profit to be made by going down-market both because that market is fantastically large, but also because the process of going down-market requires extreme ingenuity which can be re-purposed at every level of the company.
Overall, I suppose I am asking a simple question: isn't there a time when cheaper is actually much much better? Aren't there constraints with enrich as well as impoverish, and isn't the prospect of expanding your market to a group who until now couldn't even consider your product an enticing prospect?
BBC's excellent description of the $100 laptop.
Labels: $100 laptop, Prahalad
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posted by Sean Cohen @ 2:51 PM
posted by Sean Cohen @ 2:51 PM
