Every age has a script. Our script is that our technology will gradually spread to the whole world, and soon we’ll all be able to talk. Some months ago, people were predicting it would happen:
One of the first changes for Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer, is leading Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, which includes the company’s work for the developing world as well as its philanthropy.
The other real reason to put it in my group is because the other two new businesses I’ve got in my group are health and education and when we look at what the Unlimited Potential needs are, yes one component of it is to allow people to be productive, but almost invariably the other two legs of that stool are health care and education.
We’re right at the point now where all phones will go from dumb to smart. And I think that’s a major focus for us in terms of how we can bring access to the Internet and some of these technologies, particularly around health care, to this rural poor population. That coupled with online services and more sophisticated software. My dream is that we really can get to the point where it really is do-it-yourself medicine and, to a certain extent, do-it-yourself education. I don’t see a way where the world is going to scale up traditional concepts of health and education for another four and a half billion people. ^
That was good thinking. It contrasts the guys who wanted to make a laptop for the poor but then couldn’t figure out a way to keep the project afloat with money, so created a half-commercial half-charity offering that flopped brutally, and in doing so, fell behind on the technology curve and is now inviable.
As for the last key problem, transforming laptops into learning is a non-trivial leap of logic, and one that remains inadequately explained. No, we don’t know that it’ll work, especially not without teachers. And that’s okay — the way to find out whether it works might well be by trying. Sometimes you have to run before you can walk, yeah? But most of us who joined OLPC believed that the educational ideology behind the project is what actually set it apart from similar endeavors in the past. Learning which is open, collaborative, shared, and exploratory — we thought that’s what could make OLPC work. Because people have tried plain laptop learning projects in the past, and as the New York Times noted on its front page not so long ago, they crashed and burned.
Nicholas’ new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn’t work. But hey, I guess they’ll sell more laptops that way. ^
When you are looking to bring a product into people’s lives, you have to carefully look at what fits into their lives.
Here in the industrialized world, having a laptop makes sense. We can put it on our desks in our air-conditioned rooms and carry it with us in our cars.
In most of the rest of the world, people live without climate control in places where it’s not wise to have property you cannot keep close at hand at all times. Further, they don’t have much money, and they want a multifunction device.
So how are they getting online? Internet cafes — and cell phones, as the Microsofties predicted:
A new study suggests cell phones are now the communication technology of choice worldwide. According to a U.N. report, six in 10 people across the globe now use mobile phones, particularly in developing countries. The International Telecommunication Union says by the end of last year, there were an estimated 4.1 billion subscribers globally. In 2002, there were about 1 billion. And developing countries now account for about two-thirds of cell phones in use. ^
As I’ve predicted in other posts, cell phones, netbooks and etext readers are converging into a new type of gadget. It will be easily portable and cheap like a phone; it will have the wacky touch screen interface of an ebook reader or iphone; it will have the keyboard and light computer function of a netbook, because 90% of people do the same simple tasks 90% of the time, and those barely require the computer technology of the late 1980s.
This is the new revolution. It’s not your latest AJAX-enabled website. The next revolution is the new interface, and the new gadget, that will take the web beyond the personal computer and into the realm of being an appliance like other everyday objects we now take for granted: phones, clocks, toilets and ATMs.