OLPC heralds era of low-cost computing

By Dan Nystedt, IDG News Service, 12/20/07

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Critics of the One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) Project like to point out that it has not yet lived up to its goal of putting $100 notebooks in the hands of millions of kids in poor countries, but that's a short-sighted view considering the impact it's already having on the computer industry.

OLPC's XO laptop and the dream of the $100 notebook PC have driven down the cost of computing and highlighted the issue of the lack of computing resources in developing nations.

It has inspired an entirely new class of low-cost laptop, which already includes two rival devices in the Eee PC and Classmate PC and will have many more by the end of 2008, according to research company IDC. The laptop has also roused big technology companies to join the fray with research dollars and plans for the future.

Intel and Microsoft, for example, are hard at work tweaking chips (Diamondville) and software ($3 for XP, Office and a suite of additional software) for this low-cost segment of the laptop industry.

"There's a lot of potential, because everyone is looking at this market," said Richard Shim, research manager for personal computing at IDC.

A number of trends are occurring due to the low-cost laptop drive, he said. Prices are falling and companies are branching out with new laptop designs. The Eee PC, for example, is ultra-portable, weighing less than a kilogram and carrying a small, 7-inch screen.

Shim says he has already seen new low-cost laptops that have yet to be unveiled, and said "all the major guys" are looking into such devices, but he declined to reveal further information due to nondisclosure agreements.

To be sure, laptop PC prices were already falling prior to the launch of OLPC's XO laptop, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. The proliferation of LCDs in laptops, desktop monitors and other devices has pushed down the price of such screens to below that of older, CRT (cathode-ray tube) monitors in some cases, and iPods and other digital music players have helped lower the price of hard disk drives and flash memory storage.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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