June 1st, 2005
Maryann Jones Thompson, editor of sandhill.com reports in her article Software for Everyone about a panel discussion held as part of Software 2005 between
- Iain Morris, senior VP, AMD
- Nicholas Negroponte, Professor & Chairman, MIT Media Lab
- Teresa Peters, executive director, Bridges.org
- and moderated by David Kirkpatrick, technology editor at Fortune
where they discuss the next big revolution in information technology - bringing IT to the poor. They note how companies like AMD are bringing down costs of hardware so that computers can reach a larger part of the 6.4 billion people in the world today than the current penetration of a mere 15%.
However, more interesting are the points they note about what needs to be done to bring software to the poorer parts of the world:
- Lower cost and ease of use of software
“At least 50 percent of the remaining cost [in the $100 laptop] is the ‘fat’ in software,” says Negroponte. He claims today’s software is so difficult to use that it impacts the ability of the developing world to take advantage of it let alone pay for it.
- Develop localized content and training
“The ground-level realities are that people need to be trained,? says Peters. ?There needs to be locally developed content. When you talk about poverty, you need content focused around education, but also healthcare and small business development Going from 50 people to 6 million is a tough jump in terms of training…”
- Fund local technology providers
“The technology solutions come from overseas. Local, small companies cannot get the attention of those with funding.” Peters would like to see the private sector in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world work closely with local providers to help them get the attention of global funders which would increase the effectiveness of local technology solutions.
But there are a couple of more points we would like to add to the wish list:
- Reduce the cost of customization
One way to do this is to involve local companies in the region. However, to really achieve the benefits of software to grow small businesses, we need to build software that is far easier to customize. Our vision:
- Component-Based Architecture makes building customized code easier,
- Object Databases make building customized databases easier, and drastically brings down the impedence mismatch between code and data while customizing software.
- Agile Development makes the process of customization more manageable.
- Pervasive Connectivity and Server-based computing
There’s no escaping the fact that contemporary and future software solutions will be tightly integrated with (if not completely running off) the Internet. Infrastructural development needs to be accelerated
and server-based software solutions need to be created that can be easily customized for individual users
Posted in Affordable Technology |
