Inside UP : Relevance

Gladys!

jamesu — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:14:32 GMT

Gladys Kenfack is a pretty remarkable person. She works on the UPG team where she owns our strategy for web and digital marketing. She owns more than just the strategy because she does the actual work as well. She grew up in Cameroon, went to college in the US, and then worked as a software test engineer here at Microsoft for 5 years before joining the UPG marketing team this past fall.

Her personal story is so interesting that Marie Claire magazine is running a profile on her this month. You can read it here. They compare her with women who went on to become, among other things, race car drivers and novelists. Gladys’ passion is the social enterprise, and she does a great job combining her marketing skills, her technical skills, and her family background from Africa to help keep us honest here in Redmond. It’s one thing to talk about building technology that is relevant in emerging markets, Gladys simply knows what can and cannot work. We are very lucky to have her on the team.

Innovative Teachers, This Time in Hong Kong

jamesu — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:33:15 GMT

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:

The Delightful People from Aga Khan

jamesu — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:07:20 GMT

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 Explained

jamesu — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:38:36 GMT

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.

We Have a Name: "Creative Capitalism"

jamesu — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:21:51 GMT

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.

OLPC in the News (Part 2)

jamesu — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 01:17:17 GMT

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.

OLPC in the News ...

jamesu — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:09:22 GMT

Well, it seems like the OLPC organization is in the news a lot lately, even more so than usual. Stories that caught my eye over the last week included a CNN report, a BBC story from Monday, and of course the Wall Street Journal page A1 story that came out this last Saturday.

Microsoft's approach to the OLPC continues to be that we will work with them to see if we can get Windows to run on the XO machine -- there is still a lot of technical work to do, despite what you might hear in the press -- but otherwise we need to remain focused on our Unlimited Potential mission for enabling social and economic opportunity for the next five billion through transforming education, fostering local innovation, and enabling jobs and opportunity. We are applying a great deal of energy across these three areas in pilot projects around the world, and we don't really want to get distracted by the public rhetoric taking place around the OLPC and their XO machine. We are working with partners on a broad spectrum of solutions for education in emerging markets -- and low cost computing is just one of them -- but we also have pilot projects in other areas ranging from rural kiosks to new approaches for subscription computing, new applications for cell phones, new models for Internet cafes/community centers, and new approaches for mobile and remote access to the Internet. We have a lot going on and really need to focus first and foremost on the needs of the communities we are serving. Our mantra in all of this is "Relevance, Access, and Affordability."

The WSJ article was kind of cool in the sense that I was interviewed and referenced in the story, even though I didn't land a direct quote. I've been at Microsoft since 1995, and this was the first time I have appeared on the front page of the Journal. (By the way, my sister Lisa -- who also works here -- was featured in a page one WSJ story last year, for those of you who are keeping tabs on the Utzschneiders.)

Anyway, I've thought a lot about this whole OLPC phenomenon, and the best way for me to summarize my thoughts on the topic is to refer you to two quotes, both from bosses I've had at Microsoft.

The first is from David Vaskevitch, one of Microsoft's CTOs. He was an early mentor of my career here, and at one point I ran a technology incubation team working for him. David always liked to remind me that "the technology industry consistently overestimates what it can accomplish in 2 years, and consistently underestimates what it can accomplish in 10". This is coming from a guy who chose to center his 1996 Professional Developers Conference keynote around the emerging importance of digital photography -- we all thought at the time that he was nuts -- but look at what happened 10 years later. It's now one of the most widely used scenarios on the PC today (and among other things, a staple ingredient for how I create this blog.) And for what it's worth, I used this quote in my interview with the WSJ to summarize our view of what Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC are doing.

The second quote comes from Doug Burgum, the man who spent 25 years building the Great Plains/MBS business into what ultimately became a billion dollar division for Microsoft before he retired this past summer. Doug had an amazing capacity to inspire a community of channel partners into creating an ecosystem around a shared vision and more importantly a shared set of values. His quote -- it actually originated from Margaret Mead, but Doug liked to use it a lot -- was to "Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." One of the powerful ideas behind the OLPC is their approach for harnessing the power and excitement of a community to accomplish a shared (and in this case, noble) mission. We know at Microsoft what this can feel like; sometimes people forget that my company has a lot of experience with building communities organically. There's nothing like the feeling you get when you start a parade!

So my view on the OLPC is that Nicholas, Walter, Mary Lou-- all people I've never met but whom I admire at a distance -- are a group of dangerous dreamers (another Dougism) who are out to change the world and could have a huge impact on education over the course of the next ten years, but not so much in the next two. I love the boldness of their vision, their focus on serving the needs of poor children, and their desire to do great things.

But I also know the reality of the physics of the IT industry and the difficulty in trying to go from zero to millions of deployed, functioning, supported machines in a matter of months. About the nature of how this industry works, where one group may come up with an idea and then other organizations or individuals build on the idea and come in from seemingly nowhere (hello ASUS!) with a different type of solution to fill a vacuum created by the original vision. (Ask me how I felt after I read the first public draft of the Enterprise Java Beans spec, a document that was "inspired" by work we were doing on COM and MTS in the mid-90's.) And how the implementation of IT visions ultimately comes down to customer choice, because people -- even people who work in government Ministries of Education -- are rational actors who select things that are in their best interest and take into account price, roadmap, TCO, pedagogies, politics, local infrastructure, support, bake-off results, the need for measurable outcomes, you name it ... the whole variety of factors that go into a complex government purchase process.

It takes a village to buy a computer, and it's always harder than you think it will be.

But that's all OK, because the OLPC vision isn't going to go away. There will be a permanent role for low cost, flash-based PCs in national education and technology policies. The XO will survive and evolve, and I bet every laptop vendor on the planet including Dell and HP will have a competing machine within 24 months. A new ecosystem of collaborative, social network-inspired and Internet-enabled education software will emerge. Cell phones will play a bigger role in this space than even Nicholas is publicly acknowledging. And kids and teachers will author a lot of the content.

Dangerous dreamers who assume they will change the world in two years but actually do so in ten, in a manner they never initially anticipated. That's my personal view of what the people at OLPC are trying to do. I love the industrial design, I love the screen, and I love the rabbit ears. I wish the team well. But there are other dangerous dreamers out there, and ultimately it will be the magic of software delivered in a sustainable manner that will be the key to transforming education.

But now I need to go back to work.

Beyond Stories

jamesu — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 22:00:24 GMT

Yesterday I attended AMD's 50x15 partner summit in Sunnyvale, California. 50x15 is AMD's equivalent to Microsoft's Unlimited Potential, with the idea that 50% of the world's population can achieve access to the Internet and computers by the year 2015. In attendance were representatives from technology vendors (HP, Cisco, Dell, Nokia, Google, Sun, Microsoft), some NGOs, and even the guy who played Janice Soprano's narcoleptic boyfriend on season three of the show. (More on that later.)

The meeting format was a day-long roundtable with about 50 people in the room. I have to confess after the first couple of speakers I was really worried that it was going to be a bad day. It's not because Tom McCoy or Dan Shine were poor speakers with little to say, it was just the opposite. They were interesting, with heartfelt and inspiring stories about ICT projects AMD had sponsored in emerging markets around the world. Great stories told with flair and LOTS of photos. AMD is doing really cool work.

It's just that AMD's stories are pretty much the exact same stories that Microsoft tells, that Cisco tells, that Nokia tells, that Intel tells, that Qualcomm tells. I was worried that that I was going to sit through a day-long meeting listening to different vendors going through variations of the exact same storytelling approach we (I) use in UPG: sponsor pilot in remote location; go there and take pictures, tell the story, hope it spreads, and potentially accrue some goodwill for your company. Instead of being involved in a coordinated effort of "Doing well by doing good", by seeing for the first time what other vendors in this space are doing, it made me wonder ... are we all engaged in an exercise of "Feeling good by doing good?"

That's why I was worried it was going to be a bad day.

Don't get me wrong, these pilots have huge impact in the communities they serve, and you can see it in the faces of the people we film. Maybe I am too cynical, or maybe I was bummed with the realization that the work we were doing in UPG wasn't necessarily that original or unique.

But what I realized yesterday is that the emphasis on storytelling by vendors masks the two huge problems we need to address if we, as an industry, are going to move beyond stories and drive these programs to scale to achieve the true impact we all hope for:

We need to figure out which projects actually work
We need a better way for ICT vendors to work together

The first point is quite significant. The ICT4D community doesn't really have a systematic, objective, and agreed-upon way to measure the true outcome of these projects -- whether it's the design approach for a telecenter or a project for rural Internet access or a BOP student computing architecture -- that helps us determine if the project is scalable and sustainable. During the afternoon of the AMD summit there was a panel discussion that called for the creation of an online community to help share ideas around best practices or even ratings of different ICT4D projects, and this would be a good starting point. (We have kicked around the idea inside of Microsoft of starting one of these, send me a note if you are interested or would like to participate.) My gut feel is that ultimately market forces will pick what works, but the market may need some help in at least sharing ideas on what is out there in a consistent and accessible way.

On the second point, I wonder if we need some sort of industry manifesto or consortium to better integrate the efforts of different vendors involved in this space. A starting point might be some voluntary standards on how to document and report on the investment, shape, and outcome of these pilot projects we are all doing. This might be hard given that many of these projects are incubations for future products that will compete in the market (because emerging markets are in the end, well, markets) but if the technology industry can agree upon standards for measuring claims of system performance, we should at least be able to agree upon standards for measuring claims of social performance. The last thing we need is some heavyweight standards type effort that slows down our work or even worse sucks up resources that we could instead be spending in the field, but there are so many vendors engaged in these types of projects that there is clearly an opportunity for synergy. Perhaps this is an area where the Clinton crowd can help.

In the absence of wide-scale and repeatable successes driven by closer levels of cooperation among participants in this space, all we have to rely upon for the time being are stories, and what ultimately made it a great day yesterday was that the quality of stories told at the summit were very, very good. The actor Turk Pipkin (the Sopranos guy) spent an hour going through the Nobelity Project, which centers around a documentary film he created involving interviews with 9 Nobel laureates discussing ideas on how to improve the world. (Attendees got copies of the film, and I may write a review in the next day or two.) Mathew Chetty (right) from AMD described some of the Learning Labs his company has in place in Africa, and it was great to hear the passion of an African describing ICT successes in Africa. Kristin Petersen, the founder of Inveneo, walked us through some of the projects her company is doing. Inveneo is interesting because they are essentially a non-profit systems integrator that does turnkey communication and computing solutions for NGOs, mostly in Africa. They also have created a skills certification program that will be the sort of thing we will need to sustain these projects from within local communities, especially in rural areas. Joe McCarthy from Nokia did a fly-by of some of the great projects his company is doing. This is clearly an area where I would like to learn more (I also plan to post pointers to the different slide decks people used.) Finally, Kate Stohr from Architecture for Humanity described how her group took a simple idea -- volunteers doing architecture and design work in emerging markets -- and scaled it with minimal overhead to a mass phenomenon with hundreds of thousands of participants. She also had some sample chocolate bars from one of their projects in Ecuador that she handed out to the crowd.

So in the end I'd like to thank Dan Shine and the AMD 50x15 team for organizing a great summit yesterday, because it got me thinking about what we need to do beyond telling stories, creating a systematic way to get the projects to scale without sacrificing the sense of energy and hope that draws so many different types of people into this effort.

Beyond Travel

jamesu — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:22:50 GMT

It has been over a week since I returned from my trip to Helsinki, which makes it three out of the last five weeks that I have been on the road outside of the US. While I was in Finland, some of my colleagues in the Unlimited Potential Group were scattered to other parts of the globe. Orlando Ayala and Debby Fry Wilson were in China where they met with partners, helped open a community technology center, and even adopted a panda (as part of a environmental sponsorship program). Michael Rawding --who runs our Partners, Products, and Solutions team -- was in Rwanda, Kenya, and Nigeria. He spoke at the Connect Africa Summit in Kigali and then met with local leaders in the other two countries. National Public Radio in the US ran a piece on the conference. Craig Bruya, who recently joined the UPG team to run strategy for us, was in South Africa meeting with a partner. Will Poole was actually at home last week but leaves Seattle today for a flight to Macau.

So the casual reader of this blog might reach the conclusion that all that these Microsoft people do is jet around the world, attend conferences, and cut ribbons at opening ceremonies for community computing centers. At times I must confess that I feel like a highly paid travel writer.

But there is a method to our madness.

As I mentioned in my opening post, Unlimited Potential is actually a product group that is incubating new technologies targeting the needs of people in the middle and bottom of the economic pyramid. We have sales and technical people in the field who work directly with our partners (including governments and NGOs, by the way) on technology trials and incubations, and we have R&D people in Redmond, India, and China who develop the new technologies and solutions that go into the pilot programs in the field. These two groups work under a single management team to streamline the feedback and decision-making process.

Our goal is straightforward -- developing technology for the next 5 billion people -- and we are guided by a core set of requirements that have emerged for the middle and bottom of the pyramid (which we call MOP and BOP, by the way): Relevant (the technology needs to be useful to people within the context of their daily life); Accessible (it needs to be delivered to where they live); and Affordable (they -- or someone -- can pay for it.)

It is important to understand that our field trials are testing business models as much as they are testing new products and solutions. In almost every case, these new business models involve working with local partners and entrepreneurs. Traditional software industry licensing models -- and pricing levels, for that matter -- may not work in many of these segments. There is an assumption in some circles that the only alternative to this is a "free" open source model, but open source has its own issues in terms of helping bootstrap local technology economies, which we believe is a requirement for success in this mission. And one of the things we are hearing, especially from our experiences in Africa, is that a straight, aid-based model may not be the best way for countries to improve their economies at a national level. Sustained development requires the creation of local businesses, and helping create opportunity for local businesses is something Microsoft likes to do.

When you hear people talk about "new models where business meets philanthropy", this is what they are talking about.

The actual technologies and solutions we are developing cross a broad spectrum, ranging from policy-level programs like the work we are doing with Telecentre.org to hardcore engineering device-specific software development, including the porting of Windows and Office to the emerging class of low cost flash-memory based PCs that are proving to be popular in education scenarios. And we have developed an internal planning tool we call the "Innovation Lifecycle" that we use to gauge the progress of these business model/new technology pairings as they advance through their incubation trials. Many of these projects will never reach broad scale deployment and adoption, and we are consciously trying to avoid the type of hype cycle that characterizes the way the technology industry (including Microsoft!) typically markets products.

So the point of this post is to let you know that there is a lot more going on in UPG beyond travel. We learn so much when we are on the road, the stories almost seem to write themselves. And these solutions we are developing will not be built in a vacuum, we need to work with partners. But for every exec we have out on the road, we have about 40 people back at home doing (real) work. And that is the only way we are going to achieve the outcomes that we want to achieve, by trying to strike the right balance between listening and working.

Will Poole on CNET

jamesu — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 22:20:58 GMT

CNET ran a nice interview with Will Poole today. It was based on a series of meetings we did down in the Bay Area a few weeks ago. Will is one of the VPs who runs the Unlimited Potential Group here at Microsoft.

The interview includes a video clip of our MultiPoint technology, which is designed to let multiple kids share a computer in a classroom setting for schools that cannot afford a single PC for every student.

He also landed a nice quote that summarizes so much of our approach to doing incubations with local partners around the world:

When I started looking at this about five years ago, I thought that affordability was the biggest challenge. It turns out that affordability is actually the third on the list of issues. The first one turns out to be relevance.

If you want to learn more about what we are doing here in UPG, you should check out the article.