Cheap computing

Expensive Notebook leads to cheap Netbook which leads to cheap Notebook . A synthesis of high-tech dialectic.

It’s a Compaq. With Window 7. I want one.

At least I can type on it, surf the Net and hopefully use it outside, wi-fi permitted.

There was a time when cheap laptop was a novelty idea , a NGO project : buy one- donate one to developing countries. The magic price point: $399.

I am sure we will have to download free software to soup up its vanilla functionality.

Next will be a new generation of “thin clients” whose sole function is to connect us to server farms.

There is no need to haul around all those pre-loaded software, just like there is no need to haul around the Encyclopedia set around campus.

The knowledge economy is finally here.

Information resides in the cloud. Come and get it. My mom was right. My head was in the cloud. She was prescient on this. What I search, store, organize and retrieve is my “file cabinet”, my information processing capacity.

Communication in the digital age means filtering out noise, extracting useful content through pattern recognition, which is a skill set accumulated over one’s life time.

Of course, each of us has a different starting point due to prior mental contour , technologically and culturally.

The burden is on me to anticipate your question, to best guess your frame of reference (schema) so I can “make sense” to you.

The Net presents great opportunities both for learning (Open  courses from MIT for instance) and time-wasting.

Companies are also crowd-sourcing , customers included, to come up with ‘prosuming” products.

(1,9,90 rule: 1 percent will contribute, 9 vote on it, and 90% will consume).

There are no better time to be in product design, in self-publishing and film producing (people are more than ready to volunteer their time and idea – after all, this new generation of net users and social net workers, male also, are more than willing to share household burden, or take up a challenge from the Net community, their other home. Think YouTube or wiki).

The creative genius in us has been hampered by various barriers to entry up till now.

(For instance, when I was in college, the only time I could get TV studio time to video tape my singing group was over the weekend, and that was considered extremely cool – almost like Bill Gates and the UoW computer lab access in the mainframe computer).

Cheap laptop. Writing under a tree while sitting on autumn leaves. Smelling the Halloween air and wishing somewhere someone is sharing your dream for a better world. I heard that Indian engineers are looking to cater to the world’s last untapped market: the poor. The poor don’t care how you look at them, as charity recipients or potential market. As long as they are not ignored. Once they join the Net community, it’s those sites who don’t get traffic are considered “poor” (the Web currency is attention and reputation e.g. higher up on PageRank).

Cheap laptops once intended for donation to developing countries, are now sold in developed markets.

Talking about unintended consequences. Can’t wait for the Tata cheap cars to arrive at the hoods near you. By then, the Indian company will already have gained considerable experience with “untapped markets” in their own backyard. After all, Wipro and Infosys salesmen had their early OJT in Silicon Valley motel rooms two decades ago.

They had a lucky break with Y2K. This recession might be what they need to develop first-move advantage in serving the bottom Billion. Bankers to the poor, and why not, technologists to them while at it (the phone is a walking bank branch). Out of this bottom billion will come that 1% breakthrough that might get us out of the hole we found ourselves in of late. Spread the seeds, leaving no stone unturned, again, the Recession’s unintended effect.

Cheap laptop. Free software. High-value and bankable innovation. I hope there will be more phone calls such as “Mr Watson, come here”. (BTW, that’s the first short burst of audible line ever uttered through the phone, at the time, greatest invention outside of two cans and a string). Same with computing, with its start in the early 70’s punch cards.