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100美元笔记本电脑的圣杯
THE RACE FOR THE $100 LAPTOP
By Kathrin Hille in Taipei
Thursday, April 12, 2007
When a team of education and technology experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in 2004 they were going to overcome the digital divide by making a $100 laptop for the poor children of the world, they were ridiculed.
Technology executives said such an extreme drop in cost would be “impossible”. Even those who saw the team as visionaries thought the “one laptop per child” (OLPC) project had no future beyond charity.
Three years later, OLPC appears to be changing the computer industry, although not in the way its founders imagined. The sector has discovered the marketing power of the poor and has increasingly come to believe that the vast majority of the world's population that does not already possess a computer will be one of the main drivers of future growth.
英国《金融时报》席佳琳(Kathrin Hille)台北报道
2007年4月12日 星期四
2004年，当麻省理工学院(MIT)的一群教育和技术专家表示，将为世界上的贫穷儿童制造100美元一台的笔记本电脑，以消除数字时代的隔阂的时候，他们遭到了人们的嘲笑。
技术行业的高管们表示，成本“不可能”出现如此程度的急剧下降。即便是将这些专家视为理想主义者的人也认为，除了慈善用途，“每个儿童一台笔记本电脑”(one laptop per child, 简称 OLPC)计划没有未来。
时隔3年之后，OLPC计划似乎正在改变着电脑行业——尽管并非以该计划创始者们最初设想的方式。电脑行业已经发现了穷人的营销宣传力，并且越来越相信，全球绝大多数尚未拥有电脑的人口，将成为电脑行业未来增长的主要推动力之一。
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