Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance of the New York Times report on the cost of technology plummeting in "$200 Laptops Break a Business Model." It reminded me of a cookbook the Mennonites put out 25 years ago, called "More-with-Less Cookbook."
I've noted before that technology is overblown; Office 2007 is unnecessary, except for Microsoft's revenues. Multi-core CPUs do nothing for Web browsing. Cell phones can't do anything more.
Now less-is-more is becoming mainstream in technology, as seen by the overwhelming popularity of netbooks. Less-is-more probably began with Google's spartan home page for its search engine, and then became common in other software, like SketchUp (bought by Google) and Picassa (bought by Google).
(Apple reversed the concept. "Less with more" is where you pay more to get less, such as the $150 difference between Apple's under-featured MP3 player and the over-featured one from SanDisk that my daughter bought.)
The idea of pay-less-for-less is frightening for technology executives, who are ingrained with "more = charge more." Hence irrational statements from executives at Sony, Apple, and Dell expressing doubts about netbooks, and then releasing products with fewer features and higher prices than those from the ASUS, Acer, and Wind.
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