A group in India has announced plans to build and market a $20 laptop computer, making it cheaper than the $100 Children’s Machine designed by MIT, the $200-$400 EeePC made by Taiwan’s Asustek and the $300 “Don’t Ask Why It’s Dented, Do You Want It Or Not?” PC from my neighbor who sells steaks out of his trunk. The name of the new cheap laptop is the “Sakshat,” which is Indian for “Crapple.”
Leave it to India, the makers of the $2,000 car and the 50-cent national sewage system, to come up with a netbook that even people who were laid off when they’re jobs got outsourced to India can afford. Who cares if it’s immediately obsolete? At that price, they can buy a new one every week and still have money left over for cool new Indian computer games like Grand Theft Brahma and Sim Slum.
The Sakshat was developed and financed jointly by the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Nuns Who Got Rich Selling Mother Teresa Souvenirs. It has 2Gb of RAM, wireless connectivity and folds up to make a handy coaster. A prototype was demonstrated at an electronics trade show in India. At about the same time the Sakshat was powered up, a curtain was ripped in half at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond and a MacBook Air with voice recognition software being tested at Apple headquarters in Cupertino suddenly began speaking in tongues.
India’s secretary of secondary and higher education said that, although the initial cost of the Sakshat is about $20 a unit, he expects the price to fall. At about that time, Michael Dell reportedly clutched his chest, looked skyward and cried, “This is the big one, Lizabeth!” The initial target audience for the Sakshat is the 550 million Indians under the age of 25 who need to learn computer skills to compete in the global market and study to win on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.”
This is why the $20 laptop must be stopped. Once they have their cheap computers, Indians will use them to build a bridge across the Pacific on which they will drive their $2,000 cars to America and buy our foreclosed houses. Before we know it, the Oscar will go to an Indian movie, all-American condiments like ketchup and salsa will be replaced by curry and the Cleveland Indians will be moved to Calcutta. HP, Dell and Apple will be forced to merge into one failing computer company called GMPC.
Email, call or Twitter your Congressional representatives and tell them to stop the Sakshat before it’s too late. Suggest distracting India from its goal by giving Google a chunk of the $800 billion bailout to redirect all searches made in India to porn sites featuring well-endowed Indian men and female snake charmers. Do it today!