ON BILL GATES MOCKING $100 LAPTOP

SAY IT ISN'T SO, BILL
 

As a long time student and shareholder of Microsoft, I remain a life-long member of the Bill Gates fan club, given both his Olympian-scale professional and philanthropic accomplishments. 

But I was shaking my head reading this Reuters article titled "Bill Gates mocks MIT's $100 laptop project".  Here's the context:

"Microsoft Corp. Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Wednesday mocked a $100 laptop computer for developing countries being developed with the backing of rival Google Inc. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The $100 laptop project seeks to provide inexpensive computers to people in developing countries. The computers lack many features found on a typical personal computer, such as a hard disk and software.

"The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk ... and with a tiny little screen," Gates said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in suburban Washington.

"Hardware is a small part of the cost" of providing computing capabilities, he said, adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support.

Before his critique, Gates showed off a new "ultra-mobile computer" which runs Microsoft Windows on a seven-inch (17.78-centimeter) touch screen.

Those machines are expected to sell for between $599 and $999, Microsoft said at the product launch last week."

What particularly got me was this quote:

""If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type," Gates said."

  Wow, Bill is really channeling Marie Antoinette here, of "Let them eat cake" fame.

Remember, these computers are for semi-starving kids in developing countries, where many of them have to walk miles just to get to a school, much less a laptop.

I've posted before on the need for inexpensive computers both for profit and non-profit driven markets, along with my view that the new UMPC platform that Bill is hawking above has the potential to be a big platform for Microsoft.

But there's no need to take a swipe at a terribly worthy effort by MIT and Nicholas Negroponte for a wholly philanthropic cause, just to sell a bunch of $500 to $1000 teeny computers in the developed country markets.

Now I know that long-term, these $100 devices portend bad things potentially for the for-profit markets for laptops/PDAs/cell phones and the like, and that may likely be the underlying reason for Bill's swipe at MIT's efforts.

But even so, he needn't have said it, especially given his genuine aspirations for truly epic philanthropic causes in less fortunate parts of the world's population.

 

Comments

[Eduardo Bocock]

Perhaps his drive to make a profit trumps any philantropic aspiration he may have or portray to have.
Seems like he is willing to give money away on his own terms just not have it taken from him in market share with a $100 computer NOT running XP....suppose you could say its an ego thing, a power thing...as I think hes demonstrated so many times in the past to get to where he is.

[Venkatesh]

Exactly my thoughts (and words ) a few weeks back, when the poor were to supposed to go online with Mobile phones. We think alike on this I guess .

[CynicalGeek]

He's just out there selling Windows Vista licenses early this year. He's completely off base in his comments, but it might as well be an election year for Gates.