Hey, buddy…can you spare a $20?

Editor's Note— Tom Koulopoulos, President of the Delphi Group, will be a featured Keynote Speaker at the Fusion 2009 CE0 - CIO Symposium, March 4 - 5 at the Fluno Center in Madison. For more information and complete list of speakers see www.fusion2009.com. Registration is about to close and less than 10 seats remain.

File this under, “How low can you go?”

According to a Financial Times article India is planning to bring a $20 laptop PC to market. Don’t laugh, they brought a $2000 car to market, why not a $20 laptop.

Okay, I doubt I’ll be lining up to trade-in my MacBook Pro, but I’m not the target nor are you if you’re reading this. The target is the 4 billion people at the bottom of the economic pyramid who can’t even begin to consider the cost of a PC today.

When I was writing one of my prior books, The X-economy I talked at the end of the book about how most of us believe that we’ve connected everyone on the planet with the Internet. It’s an illusion. The oft quoted fact that we are able to reach the same number of users in shorter and shorter time frames with each new technology over the past 200 years is a warped view of the world. I’ve heard many an “authority” talk about how it only took us a few years to get the internet into the hands of 50,000,000 people while it took decades with electricity, the telephone, radio, TV, etc. Sure the numbers are right but think of what’s happened to the population of the world during the last two centuries? It has increased six fold! We’re not getting better at bringing technology to the world, but rather to a small slice of it. I can’t help but wonder what access to education and computers for those who live in the bottom half of the pyramid will do for the world. Perhaps it will start to change the geometry of the pyramid? Charging twenty bucks for a laptop is certainly one way to find out.

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