After being proposed at last year’s World Economic Forum and debuted last November, what’s up now is not much at all, and I have to wonder why. There’s plenty of money being tossed at the project: $2 million each from 6 companies including Google. The plan is not to even start production until at least 5 million computers have been ordered. Presumably this is so that we can have a large enough order to make this project worthwhile to fabricators.
Meanwhile, private companies with no pre-orders have brought the cost of working laptop computers as low as $200. I wonder, if by “early 2007,” when the first $100 laptops are supposed to be available, we’ll actually already have a $100 laptop, with no Davos, no MIT, and no Google grant.
If we spent that $12 million on developing open-source textbooks, then we’d have plenty of free software to go on the computers, too.
This is not to say that the good folks at MIT and OLPC don’t know what they’re doing (these will be no ordinary computers, with better screens and hand-cranks in case power isn’t available), but at some point the international goodwill gestures need to stop and the hard work needs to begin.