Cheap Computers Should Be Sold In U.S., Too
Want to buy one of the most innovative, power-efficient, inexpensive laptops made today?
You can't. Right now, they're only for poor kids in developing countries.
Which is all very nice, in a warm, corporate-philanthropy kind of way. A number of tech companies - including Intel, AMD, Sun Microsystems and the non-profit One Laptop Per Child - want to help kids in places such as the African sub-Sahara rise from poverty by arming them with laptops that cost less than dinner for two at Morton's Steak House.
But these laptops should be sold in Wal-Marts in Tuscaloosa or RadioShacks in Walla Walla - or in Safeway checkout aisles everywhere, maybe next to the News of the World displays.
Intel has developed an inexpensive laptop called the Classmate, hoping to goose the market and persuade PC companies to make similar devices - using Intel chips, of course. Intel Vice President John Davies last week showed me an early version, which looks as if it were designed by a team from Dell, Ikea and Fisher-Price.
The Classmate features a 7-inch color screen, Wi-Fi and a full keyboard. It runs Windows XP, has four hours of battery life and uses solid-state flash drives of 1 gigabyte to 2 gigabytes, instead of your typical hard drive. It also looks cute, convenient and toy-like.
The Classmate's flash drives make it boot faster than any current laptop and it practically can't crash. The computer is so cheap, if you spill tequila on it while writing - which, I don't know about you, but happens to me all the time - you can just throw it away.
The Classmate costs about $300 to build today, and Davies says that number "will be closer to $200 by the end of the year."
Fast And Cheap
Don't you want one for your middle-schooler? Or maybe for yourself, to take on business trips? Disposable laptops! They would rocket off shelves.
"I happen to agree with that, by the way," Davies says with a slight smile that suggests he's not supposed to utter that out loud. (Intel's customers are the PC makers, and it's never a good idea to upstage your customers.)
Intel's machine follows behind the development of $100 laptops by the non-profit One Laptop Per Child. The OLPC unit can be powered by a hand crank when there's no electricity, and has Wi-Fi antennas on each side of the screen, making the laptop look like a tiny alien creature.
I asked OLPC's founder, Nicholas Negroponte, if consumers in the U.S. would want to buy the OLPC units. "(Our) machine is so cool - as in iPod cool - that people want it everywhere," he says.
But he insists that selling to middle-class Americans isn't part of his plan. "Were Wal-Mart to come to me and ask for 10 million units for the USA, we'd certainly listen, but only to the extent that it really helps our humanitarian purpose and is consistent with our nonprofit status. I have to keep reminding people that we do not view kids as a market, but as a mission."
Both OLPC and Intel intend to sell their machines in bulk to governments or organizations in developing countries. The idea is to put the devices in the hands of poor, rural kids who could never afford an Apple MacBook laptop, and might not even have any use for a machine that's so complex and chugs so much power.
Competition In Action
It's all part of a trend. A swarm of tech companies is moving to sell lower-cost products to people in developing nations. AMD has a program called 50x15 - an attempt to spur development of products that would help get 50 percent of the world on the Net by 2015. Sun is pushing its long-held belief in cheap, low-power "network computers" as a solution in impoverished areas.
Meanwhile, Motorola developed a super-cheap cell phone called the Motofone for developing nations, believing that cell phones are a better way to get the poor on the network. In India, startup Novatium is making $100 personal computers from cell phone parts.
But for American consumers, the tech industry offers nothing in a category like the Classmate. Heck, most of the industry apparently can't conceive of selling simpler, lower-cost laptops to Americans. When Microsoft or Sony or Nokia tries to make a smaller, handier device, they come up with these so-called ultra-portables, which cost $1,000 and seem like the worst of all worlds - small screen, no real keyboard, too big for your pocket. They are selling like snowblowers in Phoenix.
Is there, then, an unserved, unrecognized market for Classmate-like laptops?
"I tend to believe that the market is pretty efficient, and if no one's made anything like this, maybe there wasn't a market for it," says Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, whose new social networking start-up, Ning, officially launched Tuesday.
He adds that until the past year, large-capacity flash drives weren't a viable replacement for hard drives - and the flash drives are key to bringing down the cost and complexity of a little laptop. So, technologically, perhaps now is the right time for such products.
PC makers are being cagey. I asked Dell if the company might make something like the Classmate. Spokesman Dwayne Cox says that on an upcoming trip to China, Michael Dell plans to talk about a product "that appeals to inexperienced PC users." But Cox wouldn't say more.
PC makers might be wary of what is happening in the cell phone industry. Nokia and Motorola are making and selling more cell phones than ever but making less money. That's in part because they are selling oodles of cheap, low-margin phones to booming markets in the developing world.
If PC makers like Dell and Hewlett-Packard sell $200 laptops, they could wind up following the cell phone companies' path. It might be noble to get computing into the hands of millions more people, but it might not be great business.
WBJ Web Partners
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