Agência Brasil
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with a One Laptop per Child prototype.
Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, is upon us once again. As always, the big deals for the post-Thanksgiving sales extravaganza will include electronics. An expected top-seller is the netbook, a miniature laptop computer designed to be tethered to the Internet. Some will sell for less than $200. How did we end up with such cheap computers?
Ten years ago, the idea of a $200 laptop was exactly that, an idea. Miniaturization of components for portable computers made them more expensive than desktop PCs. By the mid-2000s, however, Nicholas Negroponte and a group of like-minded individuals at the MIT Media Lab started thinking about how to build an ultra-cheap laptop. Their altruistic mission was to design and construct a machine costing about $100 — cheap enough to be sold in developing countries and expand educational opportunities for poor students. The resulting odd-looking, nearly indestructible little machines were called the OLPC — One Laptop per Child.
Upon release in 2007, the XO-1 OLPC cost just under $200, but critics called the project a failure. The machine cost far more than it was supposed to, and there was the lingering question of whether cheap laptops were what kids in the world’s poorer countries really needed. Negroponte & Co. only sold about one million of the machines, and now the OLPC folks are working on a version 2.0, with a target price of $75.
In the meantime, OLPC has contributed to a sea change in the way the industry thinks about what it sells. Whereas features and performance were considered the top marketing objectives, price has come to the fore. Thus, the netbooks will be cheap indeed on Black Friday. Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target are planning to move lots of under-$200 netbooks starting bright and early.
For this, we owe the OLPC organization some thanks. Their march to drive down equipment cost has made computing much more affordable to many. While this does not answer the question as to how computers might improve the standard of living in developing countries, it does mean that virtually anyone in the world’s still growing middle class, numbering hundreds of millions in China and India alone, can now afford their own computer. What will be done with those computers is a good question, and one for which there are many, many possible answers.
Ponder that outside your favorite big box retailer in the pre-dawn hours Friday.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in technology, society and public policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the United States Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington, D.C.