Why the Simputer was doomed
Just saw story on /. about how the Simputer is turning out to be a failure. About 3 years back I was really interested in linux on the hendhelds, and came into contact with several people working on the Simputer project at IISc, Bangalore. While it is a really fascinating idea to have an open source hardware/software solution, I was never convinced it would succeed. In fact, I would say it was a really bad idea!
Unlike software, having an open source project for hardware does not work very well in general because electronic hardware is a numbers game. The more you manufacture, the cheaper it gets. For a big manufacturer such as Compaq or Dell or Palm, the actual manufacturing cost of the handheld turns out to be very close to negligible. For a company like Picopeta, however, it the cost turns out to be orders of magnitude higher! A hardware product for a niche market was never going to work.
What is interesting is thinking about what should have been done. The need for an electronic computing device for the rural environment is understandable, but developing a new piece of dedicated hardware is wrong in my opinion. A better alternative would have been to take a compaq ipaq (which retailed for about $150-$200 even back in 2001), and develop custom software for it. Linux ran great on the little ipaq 3100 even back then. Developing a nice and easily usable UI would have been the smart thing to do. Since hardware only gets cheaper, and older handhelds can be had for peanuts, this would make the “simputer” far more affordable and would have had a much greater chance of success.
In the end, the simputer still costs $250+, while you can get a modern Pentium 4 with decent graphics and a 19″ monitor for under $200. I hate to say this, but I guess this is what happens when a company is run solely by academicians!
