Stan Beer
Thursday, 02 April 2009 15:40
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
While
people have been scratching their heads over the cost of the NSW
Government schools laptops program, over the next three years Lenovo,
Microsoft and Adobe will rake in $600 million. And the big losers out
of this first world version of a one laptop per student program will be taxpayers and
the wider IT industry.
Note: At the request of the OLPC organisation, we have removed references to OLPC in the headline and first paragraph. There was and is no intention to infer that the OLPC program and the NSW Government schools netbooks program are in any way connected.
For anybody with a
cheap calculator, the sums should be really quite simple. However, on
closer examination they're not really. We do know that about 260,000
year 9 students and a raft of teachers are going to get free laptops
for the next three years at least.
A Lenovo IdeaPad S10e with
the same specs as the models going to the schools - Atom N280, 1GB RAM,
160GB hard drive and Windows XP - retails for about $775. Minus GST
from that brings it down to $700.
Of course we can assume that
the NSW Government as a volume purchaser gets the box at wholesale
price or even less, so knock 20% off, bringing it down to $560.
However, each machine carries an extended 4-year warranty, so add back
$40 for support costs.
Thus we can assume that final cost of
each netbook to the Government is at least $600. Some say the actual
cost is more but let's not quibble.
On top of this each netbook will have a copy of Microsoft Office Professional.
"The laptops will have Windows XP and the Microsoft Office suite, which
includes Word, Excel, Publisher, Powerpoint, One Note and Access," a Microsoft Australia spokesperson told iTWire yesterday.
The
recommended retail on the Office Professional Academic Edition is $270,
but the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) will get it
under its existing volume licensing agreement. For how much? No-one
will say.
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