U.S. + computers + helping developing nations + big opportunity = No Microsoft. Now how could that equation possibly be? Try Negroponte who is in the news again with his One Laptop Per Child Non-Profit that is going to help decrease the Digital Divide between first and third world nations. He is the guy who co-founded the MIT Media Lab in 1985 with his well-practiced commentary on how the laboratory, spending $25 million a year (reaching $40 million by 2003), is engineering the merger of newspapers, television, entertainment, learning, and computers. (Wired 3.08 1995). Mr. Negroponte is the man touting a $100 computer for the masses. If his work over the last 10 years at MIT is to be reality and the world of consumerism is to continue to permeate every nook and cranny of even the poorest reaches of the earth then he better damn well be ready to get $100 computers in the hands of all those potential consumers, uh I mean children, in third world nations who wake up every morning with their first priority finding enough food to eat to survive just one more day.

Negroponte, not to be confused with his early 1980