Can A $100 Laptop Change The World?

I'm a director of Motorola, so I know a lot about cell phones. And cell phones, which now are somewhat over 2 billion units, are ubiquitous. But the form factor of the cell phone is not appropriate for a book, it's not appropriate for learning the way kids should be doing. The idea that you'd have a cell phone that connects to a TV with a keyboard and a gaggle of wires is nothing short of silly. Giving the kids a laptop that they can own, that's connected at home as well as at school, is not only the right approach but it is more book-oriented. Which is why we made our laptop convert into a book and convert into a games machine. And we operate on the economy of books: Brazil spends $19 per year per child on textbooks. So over five years, that's almost a hundred dollars right there. And now you've got Google at your fingertips, and you've got all this material.

Are there people in the corporate world that don't want to see this succeed?

Different people have different agendas. Intel is annoyed that it doesn't use their processor. That's a little petty. Intel was the first one I went to, and they turned it down. So AMD grabbed it--it took [CEO] Hector Ruiz only three hours to agree to supply the chips. The real issue for some companies is open source [the computer runs on Linux]. This could launch an open-source movement on the desktop that is very significant.

I heard you recently were asked what a $1, 000 laptop could do that the $100 laptop can't do, and you said, "Not much."

Yes. And let's think of what a $100 laptop can do that the $1, 000 laptop cannot do. Three things. It can be recharged with human power, because it's very power-efficient. Second, [multiple units can work together] to form a mesh wireless network. And then the third thing is that the screen is readable in sunlight.

How ready are you to start? And will it really cost $100?