The $10 laptop has come and gone. I mean news about it, not the real thing. But the “news” was so powerful, it led many across the world to seriously believe the land of the cheap might actually do something like that. After all, had the world not been shown the $2,500 Nano, the world’s cheapest car?

For those of you who have not followed the recent news, one honourable minister, D. Purandeswari, told an august audience in the Indian capital that the government was trying to support two separate bids to build a $10 laptop. As it happens, it wasn’t $10 but $100, the Minister of State for Higher Education clarified the next day. The error apparently was a simple typo. It still is a $100 laptop that researchers at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the Vellore Institute of Engineering are trying to design and my question is: Why?

 “The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” and similar management evangelism don’t quite apply in the world of computing. Any race to build the cheapest is futile and in fact, unnecessary because market forces have, over the last 30 years, ensured just that. That is why many of us can buy the equivalent of yesterday’s supercomputer. So, why set out to build something so ridiculously cheap?

A $100 laptop is mere fancy. It has been proved by the current $188 price tag of MIT’s project, headed by the eminent Nicholas Negroponte. The Media Lab’s project took years to take shape. It first built the PC with an AMD chip; and then roped in Intel as a partner. But Intel has promoted its own version of the cheap school laptop, called Classmate, and pulled out earlier this year on account of differences over funding and loyalty.

 Unless somebody can get around to a chip-maker other than AMD or Intel, a $100 laptop is just unfeasible. Some months, BBC estimated the real cost of the PCs being made by Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project. The motherboard alone accounted for $73 and one can see very little of that changing. The other costs including marketing and administration were minimal and hard to drive down.  

The Indian effort in question is partly led by the redoubtable Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor at IIT-Chennai and an entrepreneur and visionary with several achievements, notably in the telecom space. He has real technological achievements (Wireless in Local Loop, for example) against his name but this one raises questions because this one doesn’t stop at merely building a cheap laptop. Marketing and much more is needed to create sizable economies of scale, something at which even the evangelical Negroponte failed, in order to make the $100 laptop real. Also, remember Simputer? It was a damn good hand-held computer and won worldwide acclaim. But it achieved little in the commercial marketplace. Seen one lately?