NSW schools netbooks program to present a $600 million bill for taxpayers

Stan Beer
Thursday, 02 April 2009 14:40

Opinion and Analysis

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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