Competition: Good for Changing the World

In my recent post “Opportunities in our Lap?” I provided some of my thoughts and an update on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) or $100 Laptop initiative and received a lot of response and notes from many readers and other bloggers. (thanks) So I wanted to send out this quick update with some additional articles that came out in the past week. 

“A laptop to change the world” by Jeremy Allison (Google employee working on Samba) was recently posted on ZDnet News.  Jeremy and I share some very similar interests as he too found the most notable progress of OLPC was their work on the software and OS (Operating System).  In his last paragraph Jeremy did a great job of paraphrasing what I've been outlining with my comments on mass personalization and the Snowflake Effect when he said:

"There are roughly one billion people with access to the Internet in the first world. The OLPC project and machines like it are designed for the other five billion on this planet. Even if it fails, it will have an enormous impact on the computing landscape. If it succeeds, I think it will change the world in ways we currently can't envisage.” 

David Berlind from ZDnet also posted a very relevant article called “Will Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child be a problem for Microsoft?”  The ZDNet image gallery now has some new pictures and videos of the “near production-level” version of the OLCP laptop.  David also took particular note of the OLPC progress on software and OS.  He noted for example how this is introducing a fascinating potential for lots of competition on the future of both software and operating systems amongst everyone from individuals to giant corporations and governments, and from open source to fully proprietary models. 

One example of this effect has already happened with Microsoft’s recent announcement of a their new $3 Windows with Office bundle for governments of developing countries as they too go after the 5.6 billion people on this planet who have yet to have access to personal computers and the Internet.  You can read more about this and the ties to OLPC in “Microsoft’s Linux Defense: $3 Windows Office bundle”. 

My take?  This is all FANTASTIC news for the future of learning and performance for ALL of us! 

Wouldn't it be great if there was fierce competition to do such things as enabling EVERY one of the 6.6 billion of us on the planet to have ready and easy access to computing power, wireless connectivity and each other? 

Wouldn't it be great if everyone from those working individually on open source projects to those in huge corporations and governments working on large scale proprietary systems were knocking themselves out to develop the next paradigm shift in HCI (Human Computer Interfaces), the next operating systems and applications? 

As per the OLPC example with their "Sugar" interface this is already leading to a complete rethinking of our approaches and will undoubtedly usher in new replacements for these fundamental concepts.  All this gives me even more optimism that the future is a bright one indeed!  Stay tuned here to "Off Course - On Target" and I’ll continue to pay attention to these developments and bring you more in future postings.

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