SanSay.Co.Uk

The laptop: designed for (Western) Business Users. Business Users: well-presented types who work in offices. They sit in office chairs, send each other inter-office memos and use office productivity software to do productive stuff like make presentations to help each other drift off to sleep. They aren't children. Children have different needs from a laptop. They need it to be robust, easy to use, and if someone asks them to do tedious stuff with it they have a right (because they're children) to get bored and do something else with it.

Unfortunately, pretty much every laptop in the world, ever, has been designed with the western business user in mind. The one exception that I know of is the XO Laptop, from the One Laptop Per Child programe. Follow the link there, take a look at it. See how it's put together, and the software that's designed to go with it. Now take a look at the contrasting Intel Classmate PC. Look at the differences between the two.

The Intel machine is still designed with Business Users in mind. It's a cut-down laptop PC, with a bunch of standard laptop I/O ports on the back. And look at the way is presented and marketed. It's a sub-project from Intel, brought into being because their marketing department calculated it should be. Software Vendors - big, important Business Users clever enough to be able to write Programs - are the people who will be providing software for it.

Compare this with the XO. It's a machine designed to do exactly what it's supposed to - be robust, usable in places with no mains power, easy to use. And program. That's the biggest, bestest thing about it - whoever wants to can write software for it.

People have criticised the XO as being too much like an under-powered "gadget", unsuitable for real tasks like writing inter-office memos and presentations. You can see the thinking - given these devices, how are children the world over ever going to grow up into proper Business Users? The general idea has also come in for such criticism as "who will maintain the computers one distributed?". Maybe the people using them?