One Laptop Per Child: More Fiction than Fact
There is not much I, or most, like about the Egyptian government. For the past thirty years, it has been filling its pockets with money it should have spent on its people, and the people, nice and naive as they have always been for thousands of years, barely utter a complaint. Disturbingly, as the matters became worse, and as the middle class became narrower and narrower, corruption infested among not only the officials, but also the people, to the point that bribery, hypocrisy, irresponsibility and the lack of commitment have all become part of everyone’s lives. Not much because they want to, but because if they wouldn’t, they may not survive to the next month!
That being said, and despite the obvious amount of hatred and disguise I have towards the government, I have to admit that from time to time, they take the right decisions, and today, I am all on to their decision not to fall preys to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Not to put credit were it shouldn’t be however, I have really no proof they actually took a decision against buying into the OLPC. So although I am inclined to believe their passing on was plain ignorance of the subject matter, I will try to be optimistic and assume that we came to this after a deliberation of a committee assembled to discuss the OLPC proposal!
“What is wrong with giving children a $100 laptop each,” you might wonder, and to that I reply there is not. There is nothing wrong has this been released years ago, has this been released as a consumer product - not in million-unit vaccine-like batches, and surely, has this been made as a proper computer not a child toy!
Going to a computer shop today in Egypt you can see a very different sight than you would have seen only two years ago. While it was almost impossible to find an LCD monitor, a wireless router, or a laptop in 2005, now there are piles of them wherever you go. Not that the people suddenly became richer, but simply because their prices dropped to honey spots that appeal to the diminishing middle class. Four years ago, shelling out 10,000 pounds (about $2,500 then) may have brought you a laptop that is far less powerful than what you would have got from a beige box at half the price. Beige boxes are unbranded desktop computers, assembled by a school drop-out from parts that are individually as expensive as the buyer can afford, and they have been virtually the only option to consumers in Egypt since the early 90’s. Actually, till today, you can barely find any name-branded desktop computer around with the exception of 80’s-old IBM desktops in government offices!
But today is not about IBM. It is about the people who can barely afford to eat, and still want to cope with the technological evolution. It is the family who despite having a median salary of $100, has to pay monthly bills for one, and usually more, cell phones, illegally-obtained satellite cable, and more recently, their cut in sharing a DSL connection over the roof tops with their neighbors. All this, and they have not yet bought anything to eat.
No denial, not everyone has broadband in his home, but considering the staggering deficit in family income, it is astounding that people want to step up and join the information technology spree. Today, “a computer in every home”, a campaign started by the government a few years back, is quickly coming to realization. If anything this campaign has achieved, it is putting in people’s minds that a computer is a fundamental piece of every home. Sadly, the government has not yet made an effort to give the people a clue as to what the computer is, or what it is used for!
Although the campaign was facing slow adoption in the beginning, in the past 3 years people have been amassing at buying computers as their prices significantly dropped. Surely, they are not buying a top of the line GeForce, but then they don’t even know a “GeForce” from an “Intel.” They are buying the computer because they have to - it is the next step, it is the evolution, is the future. Lacking any ambition and flattened with life’s issues, the parents hardly think about learning to use the computer, and leave that to their young children. Armed with nothing but ignorance and complete lack of understanding of what a computer is, “Fifa” becomes the kid’s favorite application.
And quite frankly, nowadays, it is not that big of an investment. A new, beige box, costs around 1,300 pounds, or $230. This gets the family a 17″ CRT, a Celeron Pentium 4, and some RAM that would be more than enough to play Fifa. After all, as I said earlier, paying more is not really something to consider, because to them, a 3.0 Ghz or a Core 2 Duo is indifferent! And don’t get carried away to think that Fifa needs beefier specs; no one suggested they are playing the latest one. How big is a difference there really is between Fifa 2000 and Fifa 2007? Sure you can spot the difference, but if you were to visit a house like this family lives in, or a neighborhood like theirs, you will realize that a child growing up in a place like that can hardly have enough artistic view of the world to draw the difference between using Anisotropic Filtering or not!
So $230 can get you a computer, and that is all you need, right? You don’t need a laptop, because lets be frank, you can hardly afford to buy the kids shoes to go to school, so them taking a laptop is by all means a fairy tale. Plus, that big sturdy metal case in your home will endear a lot more than a giving a laptop to your child! Oh! And didn’t I mention that you can also buy a $20 device to hook your monitor up as a TV, rather than buying one? Man, that is saving. Now that is another reason to have a computer in your home besides playing Fifa, you get to save on buying a TV!!
Blogging as I am, I am definitely not in the class of people buying $230 beige boxes in 36 installments, but I have come to know many of them, and have helped several buy computers at half that price. In fact, $230 is too big of an investment, which is why many opt to buy a used computer. And since to them, a 10-year-old computer is as good as a new one, there is no need to drop any tears - they save them for not being able to buy meat for two months!
And then comes some “visionaries” with the lustrous idea to sell $200 plastic toys branded as “$100 laptops” to developing countries. Not only is the price ridiculous, but it is not even worth the investment! If you want to make computers accessible to children, give them something they can grow with — a platform they can actually use to “develop”, and share in the development of their countries, and not an operating system with a user interface created by a person to the extent of what he saw in a dream.
One major issue these “entrepreneurs” fail to understand is that to us, the barrier to entry is solely the hardware. They however, devised a solution based largely on the software. If they had made some research however, they would have found that there is only one genuine copy of any software running in Egypt. Over here, you will find the latest Photoshop installed on every computer because it is the “best application to resize images.” And while a student in North America or Europe may have been considering for some months whether or not Office 2007 is worth the upgrade, people here upgraded to it, from day one, on the single basis that it is four years higher than Office 2003, and hence it has to be better. After all, its cost was just the time taken to install it. Ethical or not, this is what the people have grown accustomed to.
Being a purist is nice if we were living in Utopia. Calling for all the good things like sharing, openness, and co-operation in software development will definitely make many people sleep better at night. But the fact is, this is not a Utopian world, and in this world, Windows is the most popular platform, and will continue to be so for many years to come. Linux will not lift a country from the bottom in a way that Windows or Mac couldn’t. But at least, Windows would have provided the children with familiarity of the platform the real world really has, not the platform purists and day-dreamers wish the world had been running on!
The OLPC is a limited piece of hardware, further limited by a toy piece of software. I have had first hand experience with a prototype of the OLPC last August, while at SIGGRAPH 2007, and I found it to be very close to the $50 Chinese laptop-shapped toys sold in the streets, which you can use to write documents or play Atari-like games. But kudos to the creators of the OLPC, they managed to create the world’s first user interface designed solely for the mentally retarded. After all, the children of the developed countries have sub-zero IQs and need funky little icons to use a computer, unlike the other smart kids of the world who are entitled by heritage to use drop-down menus and all the jazz everyone in the world is already using!
You don’t drive innovation by selling a product, you drive innovation by helping people build a product! The OLPC is a toy, and when it comes to making toys, the United States should leave it to the Chinese: they make them cheaper, and we don’t care about lead!
1 comment October 2nd, 2007
