At same time that we help poor countries, we may also boost our own suffering bottom lines.

To accomplish this goal, business people must change their basic strategy. Instead of thinking of products with more features, we should concentrate on more access. Several businesses have already incorporated switch. You may want to follow.

More Features vs. More Access

For past couple of years I have been predicting that price of a computer would eventually be close to zero. All recent events in computer technology suggest that this will happen. Why does it not happen?

The answer is that computer manufacturers and software producers are making sure it does not happen. How do they do this? By adding "features". Periodically they make changes and add "features" - most of them useless - in order to sell new "improved" products. Of course, they need to charge you for all this extra "innovation".

This approach has worked for several "generations" of computers. But I think we have reached a plateau. People are beginning to realize that they do not use much of power available from Windows 95. Why should they buy a new XP version and spend endless days trying to learn a new system? The rich market is saturated.

Why not turn our gaze away from rich and focus it onto poor, of which there are billions. Help them gain Internet access. For this to happen, we need to get rid of all "features" and produce a basic, simple device that enables a peasant in a poor country to access and learn from people all over world. The device must be cheap.

The Simputer

You know about FTP, don't you? FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and it is a very efficient way to copy files over internet. It's far more efficient than standard HTTP protocol (the way your browser transfers information). Because of that, you will find FTP addresses buried in web sites all over internet.

Most of time, these are anonymous FTP sites, which means you do not need a username and password to get files. You see, you can set up FTP to require a username and password - this is perhaps most common way people get information loaded up to their web site.

However, if you want you can remove username and password requirement to allow anyone to get access to your files. Most of time an anonymous FTP site only allows files to be downloaded from site: finding one that allows uploads is very rare as this means anyone can add information at any time.

It's easy to log into an anonymous FTP sites. Sometimes no username or password is required at all, and sometimes you just enter "anonymous" and a password of your email address. Once you do that using your favorite FTP client (or just Internet Explorer), you can have a great time looking through what's available.