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Games on the $100 laptop: Doom—and a nasty match with AbiWord
November 30, 2006 | 4:01 am
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By David Rothman
Who cares about textbooks? Now you can watch “a killing spree on a reflective dual mode screen“—via a video of Doom in action on the One Laptop Per Child laptop. So we learn from One Laptop Per Child News.
Less fun is a quarrel between OLPC and the developers of AbiWord. They understandably don’t want their baby reduced to what the decidedly independent OLPC blog calls “a glorified Microsoft Word viewer.” Yep, if Abi survives on the shipped OLPC machine, it may well be just for gazing at e-books and other documents in an unholy format. No creation!
Could there be a little of the soul of Bill Gates in Nicholas Negroponte‘s people, or maybe a kind of Outer Limits Syndrome? “Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission.” Oh, well, I suppose it’ll all turn out okay in the end if people can easily download a full range of software for the OLPC to add to the Negroponte-blessed collection that the laptop will ship with.
Related: Musings out of OLPC on e-book readers and Wiki as an ebook reader.
Update, 5:50 a.m.: Also see For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs a Big Debate, in this morning’s New York Times. Price of the laptop, now around $140, is to go below $100 by the end of 2008.
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Comments:
This stripped down laptop looks potentially disruptive to the PC industry. That’s why it is controversial.
Does this meet the definition of disruptive innovation?
* Simpler
* Cheaper
* Targets marginalized market segment initially
* Offers ‘inferior’ product initially
* Technology improving
* New customers are delighted by it because their alternative is no computer
More on disruption here:
http://www.ondisruption.com/my_weblog/2006/11/strippeddown_la.html
If you follow your “quarrel” link (which appears to be just more FUD from OLPC News), you’ll find that the AbiWord folks delivered exactly what Ivan at the OLPC project asked for. Apparently this means, to quote Ivan, “…rich text everywhere — file descriptions, e-mails, general annotations, you name it. We could encourage application developers to make almost every textbox where it makes any sense be an Abi textbox.”
But as a practical matter, the AbiWord folks don’t seem to be ecstatic: “I still think that abicollab will kick anything else’s ass with regards
”
to collaborative editing.. but feel free to reinvent the wheel in
javascript