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Bridging the digital divide: Recycling or innovation ?
Business Week brings up PC recycling as a way to bridge the digital divide. We also have more radical approaches like the Simputer innovation. Both approaches have their pros and cons like anything else, but I tend to favor reuse and "value engineered" innovation over radical innovation when it comes to bridging the digital divide. Here's why:
The stupendous importance of the platform: Making a radical innovation like a new platform succeed in the face of an existing, proven and mature option is a staggering task. Just ask any company that Microsoft has vanquished to know why.
Ecosystem versus devices: The question really is not access to devices but access to the ecosystem where there is information.The idea should be to find the path of least resistance to get the underprivilegded into the information rich ecosystem. An outdated PC with a local language version of Windows running just IE running would provide a much easier entry point than new devices or software.
Leveragability of the learning curve: Why bridge one divide to create another ? Why make a 'digital illiterate' learn a new device only to find that he is handicapped when it comes to what the rest of the world is doing ?
The human factor: Which CEO would not want to get rid of "junk" PC's for a noble cause ? Knowing that your junk can irrevocably and surely change someone's like for the better is a strong incentive. Meanwhile try selling a new, untested and radical innovation to the same CEO he will ask for a business plan.
Think local when it comes into innovation: Innovation should be value engineered with the objective of reducing the cost of entry by leveraging local strengths. The wind up laptop is a good example. I will say take a PC and find a way to use a gobar gas plant to run it before taking it to an Indian village. The example is extreme but the message is clear, think local when it comes to innovation.
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Normally your points would be true.
But will the PC itself help to bridge the digital divide? I don’t think so. You average village user will not invest the time to learn excel and word. Instead, I think we are looking at the PC to be a proxy to information. It is information and opportunities, and efficiencies thru better information that will lessen the digital divide. The prob is that an internet connection requires a monthly fee, which might not be palatable.
So usually this would have been a hopeless situation.
But now we have the mobile phone. This is something that can bring about an information revolution. The only thing is that the telecom operators should decrease data costs for this to gain traction.
Comment by Arun Jacob — March 15, 2007 @ 4:36 pm
Arun,
Like I mentioned in my post a low end config that can just run IE would be ideal.
MSoffice is really not needed. Thanks for the comment!
Regards,
Prakash
Comment by Prakash Muralidharan — March 18, 2007 @ 12:24 am