71 The $100 laptop not good enough for Romania

The Information and Technology Minister of Romania, Mr. Zsolt Nagy, has advised negatively a project proposed by several members of the Chamber of Deputies, regarding offering inexpensive laptops to all the school children and teachers in the country.

1. Background

The Minister claimed that the laptop’s low hardware specs make it unsuitable for any real work and that it hasn’t yet been “tested” in a practical environment. Both accounts show a definite lack of knowledge in regard to the issue. The Minister is obviously not even familiar with the actual specs, making only vague and erroneous references. Secondly, the laptop has already been part of several pilot programs and proven useful.

In spite of the Minister’s negativity, the project will go through the usual channels in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies. You can follow its course here (in Romanian).

The laptop in question is the (by now) famous $100 laptop. Initially the visionary plan of Nicholas Negroponte and the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) foundation, it was shot down by industry voices as a myth for several years. However, the project continued steadily and has succeeded in reaching production stage. The initial price is estimated at $135-$140 and projected to indeed reach $100 by 2008.

Various organizations around the world have expressed interest in this laptop. Among the most notable, the US state of Massachusets has proven willing to implement a very similar project to the rejected Romanian project.

2. Criticism

2.1. “People need food and shelter before laptops”

There are several sources of criticism aimed at this project. One kind comes from some underdeveloped countries, mostly African, who feel that this project is just a first world ploy meant to insinuate information technology in places that wouldn’t usually be able to afford it, for the express purpose of opening yet more markets. This kind of criticism comes down to: what underdeveloped countries need most is food, water, shelted, healthcare and real schools, not laptops. The OLPC has made an effort to rebut this critique:

This comment, however, is ignorant of conditions in improvished nations around the world. While it is true there are many people in the world who definitely need food and shelter, there are multitudes of people who live in rural or sub-urban areas and have plenty to eat and reasonable accommodations. What these people don’t have is a decent shot at a good education.

It’s worth noting that this quote describes Romania almost perfectly. While hardly an underdeveloped country per-se, it sorely lacks the kind of infrastructure that would allow people access to information. There are plenty of places in Romania with no Internet connectivity, no newspapers other than a weekly print often owned by local “grey” businessmen, without television or radio other than the national frequency reaching them through airwaves, no phones except for the one at the post office (and in some cases there’s only one post office for several villages), without schools or without teachers, sometimes even without electricity (yes, in 2006).

This situation makes it extremely hard for people to access information and stops any attempt of achieving some kind of higher education. It is a well known fact that many young village inhabitants go to school for only 4 years and achieve only the basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills before being hauled away by family to help with work. The lucky ones complete the 8 years required by law. Highschool is a luxury for most such people and college just a distant dream.

The situation also makes such people extremely vulnerable to information manipulation. Under-educated people in such places of the country are notorious for voting en-masse for certain parties or political figures due to manipulation via the national TV and radio posts or due to gifts and empty promises delivered directly or via corrupt mayors. There are elder persons in these places that still miss dictator Ceauşescu(!), in spite of rural-folk having suffered a lot during the communist regime.

2.2. “It’s a gadget, not a serious computer”

The other kind of criticism comes from the industry, and targets the hardware specifications of the laptop. Indeed, the hardware specs are hardly a match for what the average consumer, even in Romania, considers a decent desktop machine, let alone a decent laptop. The $100 laptop is supposed to come with a 366 MHz processor, 128 MB of RAM memory, a 512 MB NAND Flash for storage, and a 7,5″ TFT display, without harddrive, nor CD or DVD drive (this is meant to improve durability by eliminating moving parts).

In spite of also offering built-in audio speakers, wireless network connectivity, a decent software suite built on top of the Linux operating system and a battery lifetime of roughly 22 hours with total consumption as low as 4 Watts, these specs have been repeatedly ridiculed by industry representatives, such as Intel or Microsoft. Quote Intel Chairman Craig Barrett:

Mr Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop—I think a more realistic title should be “the $100 gadget”… The problem is that gadgets have not been successful… It turns out what people are looking for is something that has the full functionality of a PC. Reprogrammable to run all the applications of a grown-up PC …. not dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them, not dependent for hand cranks for power.

This venue of criticism has also apparently been adopted by the Romanian Minister in rejecting the project. However, it seems quite a biased point of view. First of all, one can’t help but notice that the OLPC chose an AMD processor instead of an Intel one, and the Linux operating system instead of a Microsoft product, which may hint at a slight case of the “sour grapes” syndrom.

The critics have gone as far as proposing alternatives such as the Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), a 1+ GHz device based on an Intel processor, using Microsoft Windows and with prices expected to reach $500 at some point, but practical implementations have so far seen price tags of $900 and $1100. The UMPC specifications are also geared more towards raw computing power and high quality graphics in a mobile form, rather than long running time, low power consumption, low cost or ease of use (it has a touchscreen instead of a screen and keyboard, for instance).

Secondly, the industry seems to forget that only a mere decade ago the consumers, indeed, the entire industry, was happily using personal computers spec’ed much lower than this $100 laptop. It hasn’t stopped scores of individuals (yours truly included) from educating themselves, studying and working with those computers and getting where they are today. So let’s put this another way: do we really need computing power in the GHz range to get anything done anymore? Or is it just marketing hype that the industry would be happy to make consumers believe, in order to feed the upholding of Moore’s law and a steady stream of purchases?

As a kid, I started off with a Spectrum-type “gadget” (8 MHz processor) and only much later advanced to a 66 MHz PC with 16 MB of RAM and 250 MB harddrive. I used them for many years for programming, word processing, desktop publishing and games, and took my first steps on the Internet on them. It only goes to show that you don’t necessarily need great computer power for such tasks. Lower specs are perfectly adequate if used properly.

Back then I would’ve considered something like the $100 laptop really something. What would a kid in today’s Romania, a kid without a computer and no chance of his parents buying him one, think about it? Wouldn’t he be grateful and put it to good use? If not, then what has changed in the last decade that made it not a good computer anymore, other than the marketing race of the hardware manufacturers?

2.3. “We’re too poor to buy cheap things”

A third kind of criticism stems from consumer distrust towards such a cheap product. You get what you pay for, some of them say, so this cheap laptop-wannabe must be a really poor product.

However, they seem to forget that the target for this laptop are not regular consumers, who can take their pick from a wide variety of computer-like devices. This isn’t a marketing strategy meant to appeal to a certain demographic. It’s about making an affordable computer available to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to own any computer.

3. Putting the Ministry decision in perspective

This declaration of the Minister comes after somewhat of a grim history in respect to similar projects. Here are some examples:

• A “strategic partnership” with Microsoft, at government level, which has been vehemently criticized on various accounts, such as overpricing of the purchased software or having the administration becoming tied-in with a proprietary vendor.
• A previous, somewhat similar program, dubbed “the 200 euro computer”, which was meant to make desktop computers more affordable to the population by having the citizens pay 200 euros themselves with the government paying another 200. This project advances very slowly (only ~30,000 subscribers per year in a 22 mil. country) due to overwhelming bureaucracy surrounding the joining procedures, as well as insufficient promotion of the core purpose. It also had its rough times, when government workers were reported to direct people to a certain hardware retail merchant, although the citizens were supposed to be able to choose a merchant freely.
• A general attitude of resistance from the part of government to issues such as standardizing open data formats, where one could suspect motives ranging from computer illiteracy to corruption.

4. The project can potentially be useful to Romanian kids and teachers

Access to computing technology and perhaps the Internet could benefit school kids and their teachers: it would enable them to develop skills that are crucial in today’s day and age, facilitate freedom of information and freedom of speech and would increase their chances of access to education.

However, the laptop by itself is not a magic wand. Simply giving them out to children and their teachers is not likely to accomplish much. The project should have to be put in perspective: sure, having a computer is great if you can use it properly. But will they be able to? That is the main question.

While the laptops themselves are undoubtedly useful, it’s quite possible that, without proper organization and supervision, the project could be hindered by other harsh realities of the Romanian educational system and turn into a fiasco.

Still, it wouldn’t have hurt for the IT Minister to do his homework.