I don’t fault the OLPC for not getting to $100. Even at $300, the technology is a bargain—it’s really great! But please—a few hundred thousand units will not make a viable business, and the evidence so far is that countries are not willing to buy millions of them. Nor, conceivably, should they when they can’t even afford to pay teachers or provide electricity in classrooms.

I would love to be proved wrong—because students in developing countries have miserable options for education. But the hard fact remains: who will pay for laptops for those students? Who will pay to maintain them? Where is the curriculum development and teacher training (critical to introduction of technology even in US schools)? And what prevents the laptops from migrating to the informal market, where they are worth more than $300 to small and micro businesses? In short, what is the business model?

Without a viable business model, the OLPC laptop is one more piece of well-meant technology on the scrapheap of failed development ideas. And in the meantime, there are already signs of a more viable educational technology platform for the low-income parts of emerging economies: it's called a mobile phone, and low-income consumers in India are buying 9 million units a month.