November 12th, 2004
The $100 PC? When hell freezes over.
News.com’s Mike Ricciuti has penned a commentary that discusses Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s remark about a $100 computer. "One way to stem piracy is to offer consumers in emerging countries a low-cost PC," Ballmer said. "There has to be…a $100 computer to go down-market in some of these countries. We have to engineer (PCs) to be lighter and cheaper." Since writing the column that discusses whether or not a $100 PC is even possible, Ricciuti and I have been exchanging e-mails on the idea. Here’s a glorified version of what I said:
- The fact that a thin client from a leading thin client provider like NCD costs $575 when I can get a real nice fat one (with Windows and a monitor) for $498 sort of blows the whole thin client thing up (always has).
- In their Novell Linux Desktop and Java Desktop System, Novell and Sun (respectively) are charging $50 / year for the same thing (operating system + productivity/communication apps + updates/upgrades via built-in infrastructure). Windows is costing OEM’s $50 to $75 and, Microsoft is selling Windows in some places for $36 and all that version is missing is multi-language support. So, software doesn’t appear to be the gating factor.
- A Sun Ray 1 is $399 which is the same price as Wal-Mart’s Java Desktop System-based box. And Walmart has the Linspire system for $248. But none of those three offerings come with a monitor.
- AMD may have a spec for a $185 system, but that too is missing the monitor. So you still have to drive more than $100 out of the cost of that.
- With so many parts [of the computer] coming from so many different places, $100 just seems impossible if all of the component manufacturers are going to make any money. So, maybe what has to happen is that most or all of the components (processor, memory, comm [net/modem], storage, video, sound, peripheral controllers [usb/firewire/parallel/serial ) will need to go into one chip. After that, what’s left? The power supply and the monitor? Then, maybe, after the novelty of such an invention has worn off, and a couple of Chinese silicon vendors clone it, the price will be at a point where you can add a monitor (or a chip into your eyeball) all for under $100 (vendorspeak for $99).
If I’m lucky, by the time this happens, I’ll be sitting in the bleachers at some spring training field in Florida, wearing my Guayabera shirt, drinking lemonade, and heckling a bunch of out of shape ball players through my dentures.
