Bill Gates doesn't like the One Laptop Per Child project, which he says is too small, too fiddly, and missing the point.
Bill Gates got it right: the $100 portable is not the right tool for the job. He risks being seen as petulant: last year Microsoft was reportedly being "very friendly" towards the project until it got snubbed when Linux was chosen over Windows CE. Also, there's no lack of irony in his criticism of a portable platform in the same breath as he praises Origami. Nevertheless, his conclusion is sound.
We have previously expressed reservations about the project for three reasons: it uses advanced technology of uncertain robustness in places inimical to support, it requires infrastructures both technical and commercial that do not necessarily exist, and it does not seem to have been designed in conjunction with the people who'll use it.
To that we can now add worries that the screen and dynamo technology may not work in the first place, that the project is distracting focus and resources from other more appropriate efforts, and that there seems to be no clear idea how to organise the many disparate efforts necessary to start a developer community ("we could use some ideas… in regard to rollout and community building" says the OLPC Wiki, forlornly).
All of us, from Bill Gates down to Bob Gresham (deputy assistant sales manager at the Bognor Regis PC World) have a pressing imperative to help the developing world, and the enthusiastic response from all quarters for the project shows that attractive ideas push at an open door. But what seems like a good idea in the technological utopia of MIT is not blessed by the mere happenstance of its birth, nor because it fits with our experience of privilege.
Laptops are revolutionising our lives because they nestle comfortably in a cradle of reliable power and ubiquitous communications. What we see as personal technology is in reality part of an enormous machine, a machine that's absent for most of the world's poor. You can't package that in a $100 box. If Bill Gates and $100 laptop progenitor Nick Negroponte were to look at the places without light and listen to those without a voice, a laptop per child would not be first on the list. That can come later: one power socket per village and one megabit per community are much surer foundations for building a future.
Talkback
MIT is perhaps not the one to do that, so start searcing.
"one power socket per village and one megabit per community are much surer foundations for building a future".
PS I did very well with 64KB long ago, or was it, infact, all that long ago!.
If our aspirations are one socket and one megabit per village, our achievement will be as small. One thing we have all learned in the digital age is that costs drop and computer power rises. Rather than use these for wide spread education and human development, we have squandered them on bloated systems and featuritis.
By the way, I have probably spent more time in villages with no electricity, no water, no telephone and no television than most readers, probably the author. This is one of the reasons we are running on human power. 1W is harder than $100.
If you have some ideas, please send them to our wiki at laptop.org.