One Laptop Meets Big BusinessFor this week's article, I chose the story of "One Laptop for Per Child" planned and exercised in Peru by the government. The article is cynical about so many problems of bringing about OLPC in third world countries to innovate the social and educational conditions.
They say that the fate of OLPC is uncertain, and it's too early to judge the effectiveness of the computers. Still, it's possible to draw lessons about the difficulties of such grand-scale social innovation. The group's struggles show how hard it is for a nonprofit made up largely of academics to operate like a business and compete with powerful companies. They also show what happens when differing philosophies of education and beliefs in how software should be created go head-to-head. Values the group has promoted have met resistance in the marketplace, government bureaucracies, and classrooms. That Negroponte and his colleagues took on way more tasks than they could handle only complicates the situation further.
Opinion
Reading this article paraphrasing how hard it is to implement one laptop for every child in third world coutries, one thought came to my mind that it could be a chance for Korean portal sites like Naver or Daum to go worldly-known sites. Google, for instance, has not only their original English sites, but also so many sites world-wide in so many different language and properly culturalized services and programs.
Third world coutries, in another words, are countries where potential markets with less competitors exist, especially internest business. In my opinion, carefull and thoughtful marketing can be a first big step toward the world for Korean big portal sites to become so much successful like Yahoo and Google through OLPC!
Reference: One Laptop Meets Big Business by Steve Hamm and Geri Smith , Business Week, June 5, 2008
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