Paul Polak is a hero of mine.

He created a nonprofit organization called International Development Enterprises (IDE) and spent 25 years there developing creative ways to make poor people in Asia and Africa less poor. His specialty is developing sustainable tools that rural farmers earning $2/day actually buy in order to increase the amount of cash they generate; his approach is to spend an intensive amount of time in the field listening to these types of farmers in order to truly understand what they need; and his results have been amazing. His organization developed and marketed something called a treadle pump, a low cost human-powered $25 pump that made it easier for subsistence farmers to grow lucrative off-season vegetables by simply tapping into the water table that lay 15 feet beneath their feet. IDE has sold over 2 million of these pumps to some of the poorest people in the world, and almost all of them achieved a payback on their investment in a matter months, lifting their families from $2/day to $5/day in the process. What’s cool about Paul’s approach is that he didn’t just invent a pump, he created a complete ecosystem of local manufacturers, distributers, and marketers that figured out everything they needed to do in order to connect with local people and sell a product on local terms that could transform the lives of poor people.  IDE is now a 500 person organization chugging along on its mission of helping the rural poor.

Paul’s Book, Out of Poverty, is required reading for anyone working in the International Development or ICT4D spaces because it lays out a fact-based model for managing projects that achieve their desired impact. Heck, it should be required reading for anyone in business because, well, it lays out a fact-based model for managing projects that achieve their desired impact.

Paul visited the Microsoft campus on Monday and gave a talk about his work. So what does a 75 year-old ex-psychologist, businessman, NGO-founder, and author do as a next step in his life? Why, start two new companies, of course! One of them is the design firm D-Rev that helps multinationals in designing products for poor people. The other is a firm that is developing its own products to take to market. The photo above shows Paul describing the concept behind one of his new company’s products in the speech he gave on Monday.

During his talk, he described his “Don’t Bother Trilogy” of rules that you absolutely need to do in creating a business case for a product targeting people living at the bottom of the pyramid. He calls them this particular name because if you don’t do them, then don’t bother proposing the project to him.

1. Go out and talk to at least 25 poor people in your target market, and spend at least four hours with each of them in order to truly understand what they need
2. Create a pricing and costing model where the poor people buying your product can achieve a positive return on their investment within three months of purchase
3. Select an idea with an addressable market of at least one million units

Clearly, the most important tool in his toolbox, the one he places the most value in, is the art of listening. Paul estimates that during his time at IDE he conducted 3,000 of these 4 hour interviews with farmers and their families in their homes and in their fields throughout the world. He actually videotaped most of these interviews and still has the tapes if any aspiring documentary film makers out there are looking for a new and interesting project.

After his speech on Monday, I had the chance to sit down with Paul and among other things discuss with him the art of listening within the context of developing new products. Here is a quick video where he describes how he went into the hills of Vietnam looking to sell drip irrigation systems but wound up getting into the pig business.

From his perspective, it comes down to making a human connection in a fact-based conversation that focuses on the outcomes that matter. For $2/day consumers, that outcome is increasing income.

So what does all of this have to do with Microsoft? Well here in the Unlimited Potential Group, we are trying to build technology products that target the specific needs of consumers in emerging market countries. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the people we are trying to reach, and I have to tell you it is a really hard thing to do, especially from Redmond. Sure we have local employees and local partners who help us understand emerging market requirements, our research and user experience teams do various types of behavioral and ethnographic studies, and our product managers spend a lot of time on the road interviewing people and evaluating our various technology incubation trials (while taking lots of pictures and videos in the process.) Shown here is my colleague Alberto Martinez, who was with me in India 10 days ago when we were doing some consumer research there.

But it’s hard enough to get customer requirements right for products being launched in the US; getting them right from the US for products designed for customers in India and China adds a degree a difficulty that reminds me of the line from Ginger Rogers, where she said she had to do the same dancing Fred Astaire did, except she had to do it backwards while wearing high heels.

So it can be done, and Paul is helping us, oftentimes in ways that we didn’t initially expect. No, he is not teaching us how to dance backwards, but last summer he was a judge in the Imagine Cup Rural Innovation Awards and participated on the panel that gave the first prize to the kids from Indonesia and their Project Butterfly submission. After the contest, he gave us feedback that he didn’t see enough evidence of students actually listening to their target customers in the process of designing their submissions, so for this year’s UP award at Imagine Cup we are making a formal requirement that the submissions adopt Guidelines for User Centric Design and document the number and types of conversations they’ve had with their target customers.

(By the way, the entire 2009 Imagine Cup is organized around the UN Millennium Development Goals, which means 200,000+ college students around the world will be applying their energy and creativity in a competition addressing the world’s most important social and economic problems! It is an amazing idea and will occupy a big chunk of my 2009.)

Anyway, for marketers and product developers, doing a good job at the art of listening can make the difference between writing an interesting trip report and delivering a product that achieves real impact with measurable outcomes in a completely different part of the world. And this week many of us here at Microsoft had the chance to meet face-to-face with someone who demonstrates on a consistent basis that it can be done. So it was a really good week.

And Paul, I listened.  :-)

It’s time again for Microsoft’s Innovative Teacher’s Forum (ITF), an annual event where we celebrate the 100 or so coolest teachers from around the world, all who are doing great things in terms of integrating technology into their classrooms. This year the event is taking place in Hong Kong. You can learn more about ITF here, including a list of the conference winners. But in my opinion they are all winners.

I attended last year’s event in Helsinki, and thought it was the best Microsoft show I’ve been to in a long time. I am in India this week doing consumer research and cannot be in Hong Kong, but my colleague Andy Woolnaugh has provided me an update on what is going at this year’s conference.

What is especially cool about  the examples I am highlighting is that they all use a combination of PCs and cell phones to deliver a great learning experience regardless of where the students are located. These are exactly the sort of scenarios that Ray Ozzie and team discussed at the PDC last month, sort of a “Life Without Walls” but it is taking place in classrooms today.

In Northern Ireland, Tom Fitzsimmons and Ciaran McLaren have developed a project to teach vocational engineering to students entirely using online channels and tools that the students use themselves in everyday life. The project is also being shared with schools in Wales, Scotland, England, Germany and Austria. The students design formula one car models, and then use video conferencing, live webcasts and other online communications to speak to Silverstone Formula 1 engineers and Royal Air Force aerodynamics experts to discuss their designs, learn new techniques, refine their projects and get first hand training from the experts. The aim is for students to build and race their model cars. Lesson materials are entirely online, hosted on websites, and students can download workshops as video onto PDAs and smartphones, or onto MP3 and MP4 devices as podcasts so they can listen outside of school. (Live Mesh anyone?)Therefore physical lessons are more interactive and are used to collaborate with each other or external experts helping with their projects. Learning and attendance rates at school have improved and, in an area of relatively high unemployment, the children learning important vocational skills.  AND they get to play with race cars!

In New Zealand, Nathan Kerr, an Onehunga High School geography teacher discussed a project that allows him to deliver teaching material to students via their cell phones. I like this project because it is an example where the students taught the teacher about new ways to apply technology to the learning process.

“What happens is that students go on field trips and collect digital images using camcorders or their cell phones. I supervise what they need to take images of so it’s relevant to what they need to know for their end of year exams. When we get back to school the images are collected and stored on a shared drive and I get them to make movies of their field trip. The data is then compressed and transferred to their cell phones through Bluetooth or USB. Their cell phones essentially become notebooks that can take up to 100 little narrated movies on them,” he says.

Kerr says a lot of credit for the mLearning tool needs to go to his students, who raised the idea in the first instance when they heard cell phones could store computer files. Since then they have played an active role in the project, giving Kerr feedback and passing on their extensive knowledge of cell phone and communications technology to Kerr, who admits he was largely in the dark on such matters before he took on the project. While he says the technology to create his mobile learning tool has been around for the better part of a decade, it was his students’ familiarity with such technology that made the project possible.

“This project was completely student-driven. I just mapped out the process for transferring the data and they would look at it and critique it – it was like being graded – and I’d go away and tinker with it a bit more and they’d have another look at it. We’ve now refined it to a point where it’s at a stage where the process is very simple,” he says.

Kerr says the development of the mLearning tool has had a noticeable effect on his students. Not only have they developed an enthusiastic interest in the technological side of the project, they have also become keenly interested in the teaching material itself. He says that before the project, pass rates were at the 50-60% mark. Now they are 80-90%.

“Technology is about teaching students on their terms. Not only do they work harder, smarter and faster, the results are better.”

“They’ve really been getting into the technology and the geography. They seem to be absolutely fascinated with the idea that they can carry around their lessons or projects in a little phone and view their movies any time they want,” he says.

“And, because they can download anyone’s clip, they have been critiquing each other’s material without my prompting. I’ve come across a few lively debates and it’s really exciting to see them getting so involved in the topic.”

Finally, Sarietjie Musgrave is from Bloemfontein, South Africa and is running a project with her students who are using a mixture of desktop and mobile applications to offer help to people in the local community with disabilities, and also to spread awareness of how the community can help people with disabilities. She thought it was important for the children not only to develop theoretical solutions to help the disabled community, but that those solutions had to be practicable, and unique to the person they were helping. So from one project, around 60 mini-projects evolved. For example, one of her students used Clicker to help Julius, who could not speak or use a mouse, to click on his preferences to communicate what he would like to do – and in Afrikaans. Another student wrote an application to help a disabled girl in a rural farm to learn basic shapes and colors in her home. The students were able to develop animations to send to mobile phones to the local community to help raise awareness of their work and the disabled agenda.

These projects used PCs and phones in a way that demonstrates how technology still has the potential to transform lives in new and innovative ways. This video where Sarietje describes her students’ work is one of the coolest things I have ever seen. I am serious. Check it out:

Last week we loaned an OLPC XO laptop running Windows to Ina Fried at CNET, and today she posted an article, short video, and some photos about her experience with the computer. You should definitely check it out.

I have to say, at Microsoft we are pretty happy with where we are at on this project. A year ago there were a lot of people in the industry who were saying that Windows was too bloated to run on the XO, and in the spring we were actually accused of doctoring images of the XO running Windows as a way to demonstrate our progress.

Yet here we are today, going into pilot projects in partnership with the OLPC in countries like Peru while at the same time getting these cool computers now running Windows into the hands of journalists like Ina, whose initial reaction to Windows on the XO was that it was “a little zippier” than what she was expecting.

We like zippier.

As part of her evaluation, Ina enlisted the help of an 8 year old girl named Ella who tested an XO machine running Windows along with an XO machine running Linux/Sugar. Ella’s verdict was that the Windows machine was “a little bit easier to use” but if she had a choice she would take the Linux machine home because she liked the games and thought it was “funner.”

This really doesn’t come as a surprise to me, because the first time I played with some of the games that come with the XO’s Sugar user interface, like the speech synthesizer, I wanted to take the computer home to play with it as well.

And it turns out that a LOT of people in around the world like “funner”. Here in Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, we just completed a comprehensive study of PC usage in 8 emerging market countries ranging from Nigeria to Indonesia, and across the board the #1 usage for PCs at home or in internet cafe’s was entertainment.

I plan to write more about this study in subsequent posts.

So in hindsight, I realized I messed up in my visit with Ina last week, because if I had known there was going to be an 8 year old girl doing a competitive industry review, I would have tricked out the machine to be way more funner for her. We could have done a pink and lavender desktop with cool photos. We could have loaded the computer with software programs like “Barbie as the Island Princess” (above) or Disney’s Mathquest with Aladdin (left) or a High School Musical flash drive or Magic Desktop or Webkinz or any of the tens of thousands of other game and educational titles out there in the Windows ecosystem designed for children.

But I didn’t, so my bad.

There are two points that Ina makes in her article that I strongly agree with. The first is that you cannot simply take these machines and drop them en masse into the hands of children in schools without some type of training and infrastructure, especially at the school and teacher level. It is one of the reasons Microsoft includes a large amount of training and infrastructure guidance when we engage with the OLPC or any other type of partner in these national PC deals targeting education.

The second point is that governments see a role for Windows in these deals because they want to build skills capacity in their future workforce, and Windows provides the versatility to engage with children at a young age with educational games while at the same time helping them learn how to use Office and other business software so that when they grow up they can get the type of high paying knowledge economy jobs that collectively lift societies as a whole while at the same time providing the individual with the income that let’s them afford to kick back, and, well, play computer games or whatever else they want to do after work.

I am partially joking here, but this last point is really interesting, because it’s easy for people in the US and Europe to get caught up in the nobility of providing technology to poor people in emerging markets in order to transform education and improve their society. But what happens is that the first thing people in these countries usually wind up doing when they get their hands on computers is play games, surf the web, communicate, do some work, AND help out with schoolwork. In other words, they want to do the same stuff with computers that you and I do. I’ve seen this firsthand in India, Guatemala, Romania, China, and just about everywhere else I have traveled.

And if Windows can enable this in a manner that’s a little zippier and at a price and cost structure that works in local economies, then I think we are doing a good thing.

 
The Ecosystem Impact of Affordable Computing

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while.

This past spring Microsoft hired Vital Wave Consulting to create a five year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model to help us and our customers better understand the true cost structure for deploying large numbers of PCs into schools serving under-served student populations around the world. This is part of our goal to help transform education and is a hot topic these days in government circles.

You can find a copy of the Vital Wave paper here.

Among other things, we wanted to understand if Linux has a cost advantage over Windows when it comes to deploying large numbers of PCs into schools in emerging market countries. The study indicates that both operating systems have about the same TCO for these types of scenarios. Windows systems have a slightly higher up front purchase price, but this is offset by the hirer salaries required for Linux-skilled systems administrators in places like China and South America. So over a five year period, the total costs for a school system to deploy and maintain a large number of Windows PCs and Linux PCs are about the same.

Now before some readers of this run off and complain that this study is simply another example of Microsoft tech industry propaganda, please make sure that you read through the white paper that describes the model and and understand what it means. Vital Wave is a good company with smart people who have relevant experience in emerging market technology adoption, and they have done a thoughtful job in assembling their analysis.

For me, the huge, eye-opening takeaway from this work isn't that Windows and Linux cost about the same to put into school labs in poor countries, it's that the 5 year cost of ownership for doing so is about $2,700.

That's right, $2,700. At a time when the press likes to write about whether the $100 laptop costs $200 or $300, economists who live in the countries where these systems are being deployed went out, assessed actual computer implementations, and came back with an estimate that the actual 5 year ownership cost is about 10 times as much.

Kentaro Tamoya, who runs Microsoft's Technology for Emerging Markets lab in India, has observed situations where the cost of maintaining a PC in a rural village in India can run $100 a month.

Why so much? Well, machines break and need to be fixed or replaced (especially when they are used by kids). Teachers need to be trained. Software needs to be upgraded. Electricity can be expensive. These are the "laws of physics" involved in the deployment of large numbers of PCs and shouldn't come as a big surprise for anyone who has deployed computers for big enterprises. Simply because we are now deploying computers to a large number of rural locations doesn't make these laws of physics go away, in fact it can make them worse because in addition to the traditional fixed costs of computer deployments you now need to deal with environmental problems (heat, dust, rodents) and infrastructure problems (things like occasional 1,000 volt surges in power grids).

Don't despair though, because there is hope. Because the same techniques that enterprises developed in the last decade to drive down computer ownership costs to under $1000 over 5 years can be applied by school districts for their PC deployments. No one is disputing the power of computers as learning tools in the hands of children, the challenge is to drive down their costs, especially after the initial acquisition.

Erika Twani, who leads Microsoft's Unlimited Potential efforts targeting poor schools in Latin America, recently co-authored an academic paper that explains how to do this. Their approach is to take the Gartner Group's infrastructure maturity model -- a technology management framework with four levels (Basic, Standardized, Rationalized, Dynamic) used by many enterprises to manage technology costs -- and apply it to schools. The authors even added a fifth level, the "Chaos" level, where

"there is no network infrastructure, management policies do not exist, and there is basic or very limited dial-up access to the Internet. This is a scenario where the dynamics of teaching and learning are reduced to the level of the individual in a disconnected school."

My assumption is that most of the schools surveyed in the Vital Wave analysis are "Chaos level" schools in terms of the sophistication of their IT infrastructure and ability to drive down deployment and maintenance costs. The schools bought PCs, put them in a classroom, and hoped for the best.

Erika and her co-authors go on to provide guidance on how schools can get out of this cost chaos:

How do you identify your school’s maturity level? What
are the milestones for each level? There are two simple
aspects to consider: the presence of a server and the level of
automation.

• Server – the existence of a server is the milestone
  between the Chaos and Basic levels. Without a server, it
  is impossible to implement any kind of service
  automation, security or management. A simple software
  upgrade would require one workday for a small lab of
  20 desktops.
• Automation – the level of automation (need of human
  intervention on a daily basis) defines the transition from
  Basic to Standardized levels.
• A server with an ordinary operating system and no
  automation services requires approximately the same
  work as needed at the Chaos level. However, the
  simplest server currently in place is an advantage.
• An effective operating system with resources of
  recovery policies, desktop backup and security tools,
  upgrades the IT to the Standardized level. This
  requires only a few hours of maintenance per week.
• Adding the functions of client management (software
  distribution, asset management, desktop backups,
  desktop management and configuration), network
  anti-virus, and Internet firewall and filtering, upgrades
  the school’s infrastructure from the Standardized to
  Rationalized level. The need for human intervention
  is reduced to a few hours per month.
• And finally, by implementing an external data
  warehouse or datacenter, the ICT infrastructure
  reaches its highest level of maturity, the Dynamic
  level. Services include disaster and recovery, remote
  management, remote software distribution and remote
  support.

This is the basic approach Microsoft is taking in our Unlimited Potential school deployments, teaching school districts and Ministries of Education how to take lessons learned from the enterprise and apply them to school labs, especially school labs in very remote and rural locations. Because these deployments won't work if we can't figure out a way to get ongoing ownership costs down to manageable levels.

I had the opportunity to participate in a signing ceremony today between Microsoft and the Aga Khan Development Network, a group of agencies administering a broad set of programs in education, health, and social development. Shown here is a photo of Iqbal Noor Ali from Aga Khan along with my UPG colleague Michael Rawding.

The agreement between our two organizations involves a collaboration across a broad set of activities including education, youth empowerment, NGO/Civil Society capacity building, rural access, microfinance, and health. A key theme across all of these programs will be the appropriate and sustainable application of technology (see my previous post.) They are strong believers in achieving generational impact with their programs and understand the importance of local training, support and infrastructure.

In some areas like rural access, our collaboration has already begun.

I have to tell you, in a week where there was a great deal of tech industry rhetoric around the questionable motives of corporations participating in this space, to be in the presence of the people from Aga Khan was a refreshing change of pace. The dignity and thoughtfulness they used to describe their values and mission will stay with me for a long time. It was a personal reminder of why we do this work and the type of societal impact we can achieve. I am looking forward to working on these projects with them.

ICT4D, or "Information and Communication Technologies for Development" is the name for the multidisciplinary academic approach involving the application of high tech to address international development problems. Kentaro Toyama - who leads Microsoft Research's Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) group in India - just forwarded around some pointers to a series of papers that appeared in IEEE's Computer June 2008 edition. These articles combine to serve as a great primer on the subject.

You can read an overview paper on ICT4D that Kentaro co-authored here, along with instructions on how to access the rest of the papers here. We are going to try to get permissions to host the papers on the UP website, so stay tuned.

Included in the papers is one the TEM team wrote with Rajesh Veeraraghavan from Berkeley. It provides an overview of some of the projects the lab is doing, including Digital Green (which it describes as "Farmer Idol"), and presents a model for the 5 stages of design that ICT4D projects seem to experience:

• Wonder: Recognition of the size or severity of a particular
  challenge in development and wonder that
  the problem persists.
• Exuberance: Excitement at devising an initial technical
  solution.
• Realization: Discovery of ground realities when the
  initial solution doesn’t quite work and realization
  that the real problem is elsewhere.
• Adaptation: Creation of a new solution that solves
  the real problem.
• Identification: An identification with the user that
  often explains the gap between exuberance and realization.

Kentaro always hammers us back in Redmond on the need to get out into the communities where these projects are being deployed in order to truly understand how the solution is (or is not) being used. Oftentimes what you think you are working on isn't the real problem that needs to be solved. The paper describes how the team evolved this model from experience in projects involving "textless" UI, micro enterprises, microfinance, social enterprises, and agriculture extension.

Another paper from Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester describes "ICT4D 2.0", a concept that reflects the importance of sustainability and relevance in getting these projects to succeed. These are lessons learned from over a decade's experience with these types of projects. In Heeks' view, ICT4D 1.0 involves primarily PC and landline- based solutions (usually rural telecenters) that encounter environmental issues (rodents gnaw cables, dust clogs machines) or relevance issues (if I live in a remote village, exactly who am I sending an email to?) He thinks a more accessible platform for these types of projects are low cost cell phones using SMS and messaging, community radio, and even community participatory video (like what is used in Project Green.)

Within the UP Group, we are strong believers in the importance of simple cell phones as a platform for these types of scenarios and have multiple projects underway in this space.

In other papers, Gary Marsden from the University of Cape Town discusses pragmatic design approaches for these low cost, "Phone First" applications that involve the creative application of Bluetooth, SMS, and phone UI.  A team from the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) group at UC Berkeley describes the sustainability issues they encountered in designing and deploying a series of remote eye care clinics in India.

If you want to learn more about ICT4D, these Computer papers are a great starting point.

I haven't seen much about this in the press yet, but yesterday Intel and Carlos Slim in Mexico announced a deal to deploy 50,000 Intel Classmate Netbook computers to poor students in Mexico. These machines will be running Windows and Office. The agreement is between Fundacion Telmex and Intel, and the 50,000 machines are apparently the first phase of a broader, long term commitment.

"Netbooks" is a term the industry increasingly seems to be using to describe these low cost, flash based machines. I know I have called the Ultra Low Cost PCs (ULPCs) in the past, but I like the term Netbook a lot more.

Regardless of what we call them, there seems to be more and more momentum around the idea of getting low cost laptops into the hands of children to transform education, and that is a good thing.

On another front in this area, Microsoft internally "RTM'ed" (Released to Manufacturing) the Windows XP version we are building for the OLPC XO computer. Windows on the XO looks like it is on track for availability in these types of national educational PC deals in September. We still have no plans to make Windows available for individuals who bought an XO in the Give 1 Get 1 program though.

Channel 9 is running an interview with with Tara Prakriya, a solutions architect here in the Unlimited Potential Group, as their featured video right now. Tara focuses on designing education solutions for poor schools and has some interesting ideas on the challenges we face in adapting a Windows-based solution for areas that lack basic things like electricity or reliable Internet access. Check it out...

I was out of the office over the last 5 weeks, and during that time we had a lot going on in the Unlimited Potential Group, especially around some of our efforts involving rural computing.

For starters, we have posted a video and have engaged in a public discussion around Digital Green, an agriculture extension project in India that is being managed by the Microsoft Research Emerging Markets team there. The idea behind the project is to use "low tech" digital videos and TVs to help train small and marginal farmers on how to improve the way they farm. The project also uses elements of a participatory social network to get over many of the trust and cultural issues that can plague these type of training and aid programs. I was able to meet our team working on the project during some executive reviews here in April, and it is pretty cool to see the type of impact they are starting to have. This is a great example of creative capitalism. You can see a short video of their work here.

Secondly, Microsoft held the Imagine Cup finals in Paris two weeks ago and announced that the team from Indonesia won the Rural Innovation Award. Among other things, the winning team gets the opportunity now to work as interns in the lab doing Digital Green! Their winning project, called Butterfly, is an environmental reporting system that streamlines how citizens can report environmental issues to government agencies and then track how public officials respond. I love this project for multiple reasons: it deals with environmental sustainability, it is a "phone first" application that combines SMS with a web based portal along with BI and social networking, and it was designed by college kids who are applying their passion for technology to solve a critical social issue.

Finally, as I mentioned last month, we had a team of people from Unlimited Potential participate in a public outreach project in Western China with the goal of raising awareness around digital divide issues that affect people living in rural areas in that part of the world. The team donated technology to schools, met with local officials, and participated in a week-long "Gobi March" endurance race across the desert. Well, I am happy to report that everyone survived the race and made it home safe and sound. Their trip was covered by Chinese national television, ABC News, and the Seattle local Fox affiliate.

So it was a busy month while I was gone, and it was nice to see these hands-on projects getting the level of attention they deserve.

A group of people from Microsoft's Unlimited Potential team are heading out to Western China next week to raise awareness on a firsthand basis around issues involving the digital divide for rural communities in emerging market countries. You can learn more about the project on the UP home page. The team will be evangelizing existing UP programs targeting rural access like Telecenters and Infowagons. They will even be participating in a "Gobi March" endurance race across the desert.

From my perspective this is an interesting project because it involves direct interaction between people from Microsoft's corporate headquarters with people living in the types of rural villages that our programs and technology efforts are trying to serve. One of the goals of this blog and the UP web site is to "Tell the Story" around what Microsoft and other groups are doing in this space. Too often we wind up writing about announcements Microsoft execs (myself included) make at various conferences around the world. Now don't get me wrong, these conferences are important because they are often used by government and NGO leaders to exchange ideas around best practices and new programs they can use.

But there is something refreshing about actually "getting out there" and reporting on the kind of impact we can make. The UP team plans to do a lot more of this web based reporting over the next year. So I wish the team well and can't wait to see how this project turns out.

Tara Prakriya is one of the technical leaders on the UPG team. In addition to driving a really interesting incubation focused on vocational skills training and assessment in India, she is an overall nice person who asked me to post a blurb about a non-Microsoft, non-UPG seminar she is speaking at. So here it is ...

===========================================

Negotiation Skills for Technical Leaders – Webinar for Technical Women Leaders
Co-hosted by Invent Your Future and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology

May 27, 11:00 am - 12pm Pacific Time

Speakers:

Gail Coury, Vice President, Risk Management, Global IT, Oracle Corporation

Tara Prakriya, Architect, Emerging Market Incubations, Microsoft
Moderator: Sydnie Kohara, News Anchor, CBS 5/KPIX TV

Whether you are striving for your next promotion, salary increase or buy-in for a new idea, good negotiation skills are critical to your success. Learn tips on preparing for negotiation, developing the courage to ask for what you want, knowing when to push and when to back-off, building your credibility before and during a negotiation and when and how to get support from others in achieving your goals.

To learn more or register:  www.inventyourfuture.com/ABI.

The Webinar Series is a joint, fee-for-service program of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, a 501(c) (3) not-for-profit organization, and Invent Your Future Enterprises, a woman-owned, for-profit company.  All Webinar proceeds are divided equally between the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and Invent Your Future Enterprises.

From our perspective, Windows on the XO is a nice addition to the portfolio of products and services Microsoft has created to help transform education, one of the key themes of Unlimited Potential. It builds on the work we have been doing with partners like Intel and with programs like Partners in Learning, which has now reached over 100 million students worldwide.

And as you can see from this video featuring UPG's own Bohdan Raciborski, the Windows port to the XO is a snappy release that doesn't cut features or functionality in order to work in the constrained memory and storage environment of the XO.

It is the same basic Windows XP implementation that runs on the Intel Class Mate, ASUS eeePC, and other products in this emerging class of ultra low cost laptop PCs. As I have posted earlier, we had to write multiple custom drivers and a BIOS to get Windows to boot from an SD card in order to do the Windows port to the XO. This is the initial implementation customers will be able purchase when the product RTMs and will be a "Windows only" XO that Nicholas Negroponte himself has described as running "really fast." Customers can also choose to buy the existing Linux/Sugar XO. Longer term, the OLPC plans to write a new BIOS and increase the amount of flash storage on the XO to support a "Dual Boot" option that would enable children to use either Linux or Windows on the same machine. This is fine with us as long there continues to be an excellent Windows experience on the XO.

So you may ask, why is Microsoft doing this?

The answer is simple: people are asking for it, it transforms education and it leads to the creation of jobs and opportunity.

You can classify demand for Windows on the XO into three groups. The first group consists of people who have fallen in love with that cute little green laptop with its excellent industrial design but are committed to Windows. I wrote last fall about the guys from the Romanian Ministry of Education who like Windows (their teams regularly place in the Imagine Cup) and thought it would be cool to evaluate Windows on the XO. Another example is the NGO Save the Children, who are interested in sponsoring projects with the XO but as an IT organization have a Windows-only Windows-standard policy. Any extra money they spend in IT supporting multiple operating systems or technology camps is money diverted from their core mission around service, which for them is not a good thing.

The second group involves governments who are considering deployment of the XO en masse but also want the low deployment risk and broad support that the Windows ecosystem can provide them. Let's face it, there are hundreds of millions of Windows machines out there in the world today, which means there are thousands and thousands of people who know how to deploy, support, fix, and upgrade them. Despite the "let the kids fix their own computers" mindset that exists in some parts of the open source community, what we call at Microsoft the "IT Pro" is exactly the type of person that is needed for these large scale education deployments. As we all know, computers break, and asking children and teachers to fix them is not always the best solution. When I presented Unlimited Potential in Guatemala to a gathering of Ministry of Education types from across the region, the slide that generated the most interest was the one that described Microsoft's IT infrastructure optimization framework for large scale education deployments. Based on that customer feedback, we've decided to invest even more into a formalized national PC deployment methodology that we are starting to roll out right now.  And believe it or not, it's easier to find Windows system administrators in places like India and Africa than it is to find Linux system administrators, and the Windows IT Pros cost less. We'll be releasing a study on this next month, so stay tuned.

The third group involves people -- usually policy makers -- in governments who see a direct link between technology investments in education and the need to expand the skills capacity of their workforce on a national scale. In other words, they want to implement policies that can positively impact education and set the stage for better employment opportunities for their citizens. They see Windows as a key ingredient for making this happen because it is the software environment used by so many businesses around the world.

Microsoft has created the Unlimited Potential initiative around the themes of transforming education, fostering local innovation, and enabling jobs and opportunity. Today's announcement gives us the opportunity to reinforce how these three themes can support each other given the right scenario and the right set of tools. If we can provide children with a great learning experience, and do so in a manner that involves a massive scale with the right level of (local) support, it has the potential for being transformational across multiple fronts. It's pretty exciting.

Bill Gates gave a great speech at Davos this week around the concept of Creative Capitalism, an approach where governments, businesses, and non-profits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities. It is an important and exciting way to think about the creative application of business models to help the world's poor. In addition to Bill's speech, there is also a good Wall Street Journal article and interview on the topic that appeared this week.

This is the concept that drove me to switch jobs within Microsoft last summer and join The Unlimited Potential Group, which is, of course, our company's main vehicle for Creative Capitalism. It is the concept behind the work Intel is doing with its World Ahead program. It is the concept behind the work the OLPC is doing with their XO computer. It is the concept behind the work of dozens of other companies around the world who are taking the philanthropic motivations of their Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) departments and integrating them with the creativity of their new product development departments in order to create a new, new thing: a systematic approach to applying the strengths of a company to serve the needs of poor people by essentially treating them as a new class of customers who previously happened to fall outside of the traditional market focus of a company. It involves a new approach to product design, research, distribution, partnership, and profit models -- all done in the name of helping a class of people that businesses have traditionally ignored.

A cool thing that Bill did with his speech is that he has given the concept a name. I really like "Creative Capitalism" as a description for the work we are doing.

From my perspective, there are multiple approaches companies can take to get on the Creative Capitalism bandwagon.

• Differential Pricing - This is when a company creates versions of its existing products at a price point that poor people in emerging markets can afford. In Bill's speech, he talked about several examples of drug companies doing this with vaccines. CK Prahalad documents how Lever Brothers and others have successfully done this with consumer goods for the poorest of the poor in India. Microsoft's best example of this is the Microsoft Student Innovation Suite (MSIS), a $3 package of software sold through government programs where the government subsidizes the purchase of laptops for students.
• New Types of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) - This is when governments and businesses transition from a classic buyer-seller relationship in order to partner in creating programs targeting specific social and economic outcomes. These PPPs usually work best in areas where government resources and expertise are achieving limited results. My favorite example of this at Microsoft is Partners in Learning -- a Microsoft program that we just renewed for another 5 years with a $235 million commitment -- that among other things has trained 4 million teachers on how to use technology in the classroom in a manner that emphasizes local collaboration and local impact. Also, Microsoft's Partnerships for Technology Access (PTA) program has worked with governments around the world to create dozens of these PPPs.
• Affinity Campaigns - This is a branding campaign where a company publicly allocates a portion of its profits from a  particular product to a development cause. These campaigns allow consumers in a small way to align their purchase choices with their desire to affect social outcomes. The best example of this, of course, is (RED) the branding campaign created by the singer Bono to help raise money for AIDS vaccines in Africa. Microsoft and Dell announced support for (RED) this week.
• New Products - This is when a company designs new products from the ground up to meet the specific needs of people trapped in the bottom of the social and economic pyramid. This is the most exciting long term aspect of Creative Capitalism and is the main focus of the Unlimited Potential Group. We have software developers working in solution areas like education, low cost computing, and shared access computing. As part of this work, for example, some people on my team are conducting product design focus groups over the next month in Ghana, Morocco, and Peru. I've worked on a lot of products in my 13 year career here at Microsoft, and I can assure you that as a company we never used to do focus groups in places like Ghana. But it is the only way we can do what we do best -- which is develop new types of technology solutions -- in a manner that has the greatest impact on the needs of people that technology companies have previously ignored.

So why are we doing all of this?

From a long-term, pure numbers perspective this approach makes sense for us as a company. There are 6 billion people in the world today, and Microsoft's products are used by about a billion of them. As a company we can grow in the future by either selling more software + services to our existing billion customers, or we can grow by selling software + services to the other 5 billion. If we do the latter, than we have to do so on their terms, not ours. And the fact that our team is now doing focus groups in Ghana is interesting because it turns out that Microsoft sells more in Africa today than it does in either India or China. Most people in our company don't realize this. There is a real business opportunity here, but as I've mentioned before there is an emerging view that this opportunity requires new partnership and distribution models and even new types of products from us in order to sell into these markets in a relevant and sustainable way.

But there is a social aspect to this approach that goes beyond business, and this is an important theme in Bill's speech. People by their very nature like to help other people -- and believe it or not this sentiment is even shared by a lot of people like me who work at a company like Microsoft. There is a place for this personal need to help other people in business, and we can do this in a manner that goes beyond traditional corporate charity or philanthropy. In other words, it is OK to align business interests (the need to grow our company) with social interests (the desire to help people who need help) if it is done in a creative way that achieves measurable outcomes on both fronts, and those measurable outcomes for the company don't always have to be measured by profit numbers on this quarter's income statement. Microsoft has always focused on long-term markets, and why can't we continue to do this in a manner that helps poor people at the same time? Hence "Creative Capitalism."

Of course there are critics of all of these different types of approaches, and their general argument is that it is impossible for companies to serve their own economic interests and the social good at the same time. There is also a more specific criticism focused directly at Microsoft, that this is all simply an effort to circumvent the appeal of free or pirated software so we can gain access to markets in emerging countries. One group this week even likened Microsoft's approach to education as being the equivalent of a tobacco company handing out free cigarettes to children. These critics are missing the point, because this is not about Microsoft or about software licensing models or even about technology. It's about the recognition that people who are in the middle and bottom of the social and economic pyramid are, well, people who might actually have the opportunity to advance in their lives if there are greater choices for products and services that are relevant, accessible, and affordable to them. This realization can create opportunity for companies, but more importantly it can achieve a social good because the creative energies of businesses are now focused on the needs of people who were previously ignored. When software engineers in Redmond and India are focused on meeting the needs of farmers in Ghana, then the world becomes a better place.

And that is the beauty behind the idea of Creative Capitalism.

A team of Microsoft people flew out to Cambridge, Mass. to meet with engineers from the OLPC Foundation yesterday. Here is a photo of my coworkers Bohdan Raciborski (demoing) and John Gunabal (smiling) as we showed some software to Walter Bender, Richard Smith, and Ivan Krstić from OLPC.

I have to say I like these guys. They all seem like smart platform people, which is the type of people I seem to have worked with off and on for about 20 years now. In fact, it turns out that the OLPC's CFO, Chuck Kane, worked with me at Stratus Computer back around 1990.

We had a good discussion and left the meeting feeling positive about the day. We still have a lot of work to do before we make a final decision around our plans for the XO, but all in all it was a good day.

Well, I will be flying out to Cambridge next week for my first meeting with some of the people at the OLPC, and I have to say I am looking forward to it. Some of my UPG co-workers from Microsoft have been meeting with the OLPC team for about a year now, but since I am a relative newcomer to our group, this will be my first trip.

One of the things we will be discussing is the status of our port of Windows XP to the OLPC XO computer. There have been suggestions in the press by Nicholas Negroponte and others that “Windows already runs on the XO.” That’s not really the case yet, and with the attention the OLPC’s “Give One Get One” campaign is getting, along with the strong level of interest we are receiving from some Ministries of Education and NGOs in buying a version of Windows for the XO, we thought it would be useful to provide some clarity on the topic.

For starters, we are hard at work on the project here, and we are using an approach that is a little unusual for Microsoft in that we are managing the entire process of adapting and testing an existing version of Windows for a new PC. Usually the hardware vendor does this. And the Windows port to the XO is by no means done. Between Microsoft employees and third party contractors that we have brought into the effort, we have over 40 engineers working full-time on the port. We started the project around the beginning of the year and think it will be mid-2008 at the earliest before we could have a production-quality release.

Because of this, we have not announced formal plans to support the XO yet, and we will not do so until after we start getting feedback from our first limited field trials starting in January before we make the final call. We do not want to set expectations we subsequently cannot meet, especially when it comes to supporting the children’s machine. For governments in emerging markets evaluating purchases of Windows for the XO, this means that so far we are not announcing an availability date, pricing, or support policies. In fact, you should not yet assume that Windows on the XO is a done deal. We are hopeful that we will have a different story for you within six months.

It also means that if you are in the US and Canada and are participating in the “Give One Get One” program, you need to understand that Microsoft is not currently planning to support a retail consumer release of Windows XP on your XO computer.

Why is this work taking so long?

Flash
First, the XO computer uses flash memory instead of a hard disk drive for storage. This is one of the reasons OLPC can get the production cost of the computer down to $188. This is a relatively new class of machine, and we have to do design work to get Windows and Office to work reliably and with good performance using only 2 GB of storage. The XO actually only comes with 1GB of flash, and we asked the OLPC to add a slot for an internal SD card that will provide the 2 GB of extra memory needed to run our software. (By comparison, an entry level $499 Dell laptop comes with 60 GB of hard disk storage.) The potential payoff for students and schools from this work, of course, is that the tens of thousands of existing educational applications written for Windows can potentially run on the XO. As part of this engineering effort, we have to design a new BIOS – the layer of software that runs between the hardware and an operating system -- to have Windows boot and run off the SD card. For us this is new work and requires a design and processes for supporting the XO’s custom SD interface and for the installation of Windows on the SD card, both at the Quanta factory that manufactures the XO hardware and also in the field.

For much of this XO flash design, we are able to leverage the work we did to get Windows to support the Intel Classmate PC, another computer that uses flash memory for storage. However, the Intel computer comes with 2GB of flash storage, so we did not have to use the SD card approach we are designing for the XO. The Classmate port took us about 9 months, but we started that effort a year and a half ago. A third example of these low cost “Flash PCs” on the market is the ASUS Eee PC, and surprisingly enough getting Windows running on this computer required a significantly shorter amount of time because ASUS used a more standardized approach to its hardware design compared to the XO. In technical terms, ASUS put the flash drive behind the IDE disk controller, making the flash storage "look like" a hard disk drive to Windows.

Microsoft plans to publish some formal design guidelines early next year that will help Flash PC manufacturers benefit from our early work so they can design machines that enable a great Windows experience at as low a cost as possible, and with a minimum of custom design work necessary to get Windows to run on their machines, such as we have encountered with the XO.

Cool New Features
Secondly, as we all know there are many innovative features in the XO computer that set it apart from other designs, and we are working with partners to write the driver software so that Windows can support all of them. This includes drivers for the XO’s wireless networking, camera, graphics processor, audio system, and the various user input devices (game pad, writing pad, touch pad, directional pad, and mouse pad.) There are ten custom drivers in all that we are writing. We also hope to support the XO’s mesh network design, its power-saving “e-book” mode, and its capability for excellent screen visibility in full daylight.

And we have a different support model than OLPC is envisioning: we are not expecting K-6 school children to access the source code and do their own programming in the event they have to fix a problem in the computer. Certainly, we think there is a role for students in the support of school computers -- in fact, as part of our Partners in Learning program we have trained over a million kids in a student helpdesk program (like in this case study from Brazil) -- but we also think that local entrepreneurs and businesses need to play an important role here when you are talking about deployments involving tens of thousands of computers.

We want to support these new XO features without sacrificing compatibility with existing Windows applications, and we want to deliver an out-of-the-box user experience similar to the quality people expect from Windows running on more expensive classes of machines. All of this takes a lot of work.

Fast Moving Partner
Finally, we are doing this engineering work for a moving target. It is literally like designing parts of a car – well, actually a school bus -- while it is running down the highway at a high speed. I am not meaning this as a knock on the OLPC organization, because they are a small group of people doing an amazing amount of innovative design work in a short period of time. But we have only received a handful of machines for most of the last year, and the XO team was doing some hardware design changes as recently as this past August. This affects our schedule.

Much of the technology in the XO is developed using open source technology licenses that make it difficult for engineers employed by commercial software companies like Microsoft to work directly on the project. For this reason, we also had to follow a complicated process to figure out interfaces for many of the XO’s hardware components and to deal with some of the hardware bugs they were reporting in their design process in order to make progress on our port. All of this slows us down, but that’s OK given our overall shared mission here.

We appreciate the support we are getting from the OLPC team, and we know the focus their engineers need to get the XO out the door and into the hands of students. Now that they are finally shipping, our ability to support the XO with a quality release of Windows is accelerating. I also have to say that if our team continues down the path they are on and the system performs as we hope, then that cute little machine with the Wi-Fi ears will run Windows!

What Does This Mean for Users?
The Unlimited Potential Group at Microsoft is developing technology to enable social and economic opportunity for “the next five billion," and one of our key focus areas for doing so is through the transformation of education. As part of this, we are investing in programs and partners around the world to foster innovative schools, innovative teachers, and innovative students. We have a lot going on here, and there is clearly a role for low cost hardware as part of this vision. In fact, there is a good alignment between what OLPC is trying to do and what we are trying to do. And frankly, nothing would please us more than seeing hundreds of thousands of these XO computers that are now starting to be deployed all running Windows given the very high interest that has been expressed in the market for it. We are committed to developing a quality port of Windows XP for the OLPC XO computer, but we still have a lot of work to do to complete the effort.