India's $20 Laptop Plan Challenges Our Thinking About System Design

According to the Financial Times this morning, India is planning a $20 laptop computer as a way of making distance learning accessible to that country's enormous rural population. Coming after MIT and Intel pretty much fought each other to a standstill trying to create a machine for six or eight times that amount, the plan is a wake-up call to anyone in the US who is thinking about serving developing-world markets.

There were no details available in the story about just how the Indian designers intended to hit that price point. But apparently it's not vaporware. The story claims that a prototype will be available on display at an education conference tomorrow. There appears to be no commercial backer to build the design in quantity yet, however.

None the less, and even if the project ultimately proves too ambitious, there is an important message here. When we are addressing the developing-world market, we cannot afford to make the assumptions that we in the US don't even recognize as assumptions any more.

Such as? For instance, take the assumption that a computer necessarily implies an Intel/Microsoft computer, or even an x86-based CPU. Clearly, if you consider the tasks necessary for e-mail, facebook, google, or distance learning, nothing from the Intel or Microsoft camps can be even remotely justified. A sufficient CPU costs pennies, lodged in the corner of an SoC that costs a few dollars. A sufficient amount of memory costs a few dollars more. Take out the mediocre mechanical keyboard and the pointless mouse, replaced by a cheap membrane keyboard, and the bulk of the bill-of-materials cost of a really lean netbook design will go into the display and power supply.

But all these costly components are things we assume must be in a notebook PC, and therefore in a netbook as well. When we do so we are wrong. The message here is not that Intel and Microsoft are soaking the industrial economies for a fortune in unnecessary costs (although that might be an interesting discussion. Please feel free with your comments.) The point is that when we approach a developing-world market, we must reason from first principles. And those principles are based on the actual user's needs, not on how we would do it in Silicon Valley or Cambridge.

This is the fun part, really. It is a rare privilege to think this far outside the boundaries of the proverbial box. And it is exciting what we can do when nothing is assumed except our ability to understand the user's needs. Engineers here have shown brilliance at this skill in the past, and in our current economic situation we have the opportunity to show that brilliance again.

EDN, a sister publication of EM Asia