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Forbes writes in an article that Intel Chairman Craig Barrett [wiki] dismisses the $100 laptop of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) association as a gadget.

The laptop, which will feature a wind-up power supply, is still not in production and has been described as follows by the association: “This rugged laptop will be WiFi-enabled and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.”

OLPC plans to start shipping the laptops in late 2006 or early 2007 with the goal of equipping 200 million of the world’s poorest children. Initial test markets include China, Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa. It is intended for distribution through Ministries of Education of developing countries and minimum orders will be one million units.

I think Barrett is missing the point. This is not about a computer, it is about enabling education and learning. And to produce a really low-cost computer you have to make some choices. While this $100 computer may not be a big hit in developed countries, a market for which it is not intended, I’m sure it will work quite well other places. In fact, I probably could use it myself as a back-up option for places where power supply is limited.

It’s easy to get blind-sided when you focus on specifications and not the intended usage. Bill Gates is reported to have said, back in 1981, referring to computer memory, that “640K ought to be enough for anybody”. I remember thinking 128K was high.

Personal computers and their applications have changed the way we communicate, the way we learn and how we spend our days. While the PC of yesterday is slow and lack features compared to many of today’s high performance machines, it was still able to impact our lives.

Gadget or not, this is an opportunity to help change lives. It will also create business opportunities here and in developing countries too. After all, we’re looking at - to start with - 200 million people with some kind of computer knowledge.

Since Barrett doesn’t like this gadget, maybe he can help produce something better?

And, as an afterthought, I understand it takes quite a while to prepare computers for space travel - I wonder what they have reached for specifications at this point? Are they at Pentium 4’s yet??

roar at roarweb dot com