Steve Wozniak to Bill Gates, "Cheap PCs can help the poor"

Steve Wozniak is a big fan of the OLPC according to ZDNET. At the Broadband and Beyond conference in Sydney, Australia, he said he was initially skeptical about giving laptops to poor children where there is no electricity.

"At first, I had questions about why would you bring computers out to villages where you had to crank it for power -- where you don't have power, where you don't have the Internet," Wozniak said.

"But you really need the Internet to have access to the encyclopedias of the world."

He complemented Nicolas Negroponte's work with the project, "I think he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize."

This is in stark contrast to Bill Gates who believes that cheap laptops will not help poor children. "That is of no value at all to the poorest two billion people in the world. They don't have electricity, they don't have a teacher, they don't have textbooks, they don't have a network connection," said Gates last week at the University of Chicago.

When asked about the best technology for the poor, he said, "Vaccination ... Small pox killed millions, and now it was the first disease that was completely eliminated. We continue to add new vaccines. That's a huge area of funding for the foundation. Looking for an AIDS vaccine, a tuberculosis vaccine, a malaria vaccine ... That would make a dramatic difference." Gates has a vested interest in global health and welfare. In 2000, he created the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

He has made previous comments against the OLPC project.

"The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk ... and with a tiny little screen. If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection, and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type," Reuters quoted Gates in Washington, DC at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in 2006.

Although the initial designs of the XO-1 laptop had a crank, in its current form, there is no crank.

When asked about the lessons learned about the fallout of Intel with OLPC, he told CNET in an interview, "OLPC hasn't done that well. Emerging markets are growing for PCs, people are doing cheap PCs. We've always believed in cheap PCs. If the hardware were free, we'd be happy. We're about the software. We're in literally over 100 countries with special versions of Windows, including Starter Edition. OLPC is nowhere compared to where we are on this thing. If that form factor, some people want to use that, we'll make sure Windows is available on that."

Wozniak had planned to switch to the XO in his daily computing.

"I had the intention to switch over ... and carry it everywhere but I didn't make it that far."