No amount of hype makes MIT $100 PC a reality

LAST WEEK'S story on MIT's $100 PR, er laptop project stirred up interesting email from many different corners, but it didn't stop the "Lights, Camera, Action, Negroponte!" show - with apologies to the Wiggles - at the UN Internet Summit in Tunis.

According to the PRganda, poverty-stricken children need $100 laptops for educational purposes and this will have a magical transformation on their lives - assuming that their families have the luxury to keep them, rather than to figure out a way to make a living with them.

Even before the hardware has moved out of mockup design phase and into reality, Negroponte says that the price per laptop won't be $100, but has drifted upward to around $115. And this is before the never-before-mass-produced dual-mode LCD display has been finalised, much less cranked up to any quantities in prototype form. Don't be surprised if first run units end up arriving not in late 2006, but sometime in 2007 and costing closer to $135 to $150 once the smoke clears.

Lee Felsenstein, he of the Homebrew Computer Club and Osbourne I design fame, has done some hard-core meditation on both the hardware design features as well as the underlying infrastructure - or lack - as to what will happen after you throw out $100 hardware. Not to mention more complicated social and cultural meditations. Felsenstein was in Tunsia at the latest cheerleading sessions.

Since he's actually built hardware on the cheap in the real world, as well as put together a project for deployment in Laos, he's not talking out of his hat. You can find Feinsenstein's observations here.

Michael Robertson and the folks at Linspire have also done homework on low-cost computers and markets for them. In a nutshell, they believe offering a cut-down laptop is a waste of time and people will desire a "real" computer, rather than something stripped of disks with a minimal processor. Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire, points out "Even if MIT's engineers succeed in building this device, there will be other problems to solve, such as distribution costs, support costs, and the $100 question...Will the laptop be powerful enough and perform well enough for students to even consider using it?" Robertson's take on it is a bit more hilarious.

If you want some more realistic efforts to help the developing world with technology, the less-hyped TIER (Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions) project, here out of UC Berkeley looks to be a better bet on a whole lot of fronts. Funding for the project is being done through the US National Science Foundation, with additional support from Intel, HP, and Microsoft on the corporate side and the UNDP, Grameen Bank, and Markle Foundation on the non-profit side.

Driving TIER from UC Berkley is Eric Brewer. In his past life, he was the founder and chief scientist for Inktomi, so he actually has a) worked in the Real World, b) successfully brought a company from nothing into something and c) made money in the process. So far, the MIT Media Lab has seemed to be really good at making press releases and taking down lots of corporate cash.

TIER is doing things the right way by going into developing areas, looking at the challenges there, and then setting about building solutions that work. It's a far different approach from the pie-in-the-sky $100 laptop that seems to be more obsessive about sound bites than appropriate solutions. Without a lot of lights and cameras, TIER is already looking at many of the issues that the MIT wonder-laptops will need in order to be effectively used if they every get built in large numbers, such as developing courseware and building broadband networks and storage infrastructure. µ