Lightning in a Bottle

Last year Nicholas Negroponte and his colleagues at MIT proposed the idea of creating $100 student laptops. The idea seems to have moved beyond pie-in-the-sky and a step closer to reality. Some of the companies that have joined the project include Google, AMD (the chip manufacturer), and Red Hat, which distributes a version of the Linux operating system. In addition, the governments of China and Brazil are working with the MIT group to distribute the machines in their countries.

Now, the governor of Massachusetts joined the party. Governor Romney has proposed purchasing the same computers for middle-school students throughout the state, starting in 2006 or 2007, whenever they become available.

I’ll be really interested to see if they can pull this off. It sounds like they have most of their ducks in a row to make it happen. It has the potential of being a very disruptive technology - especially if they hit their goal of 150-200 million machines in the first two years

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 27th, 2005 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Technology Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.