Last updated on August 17, 2011
Forget pie-in-the-sky projects like One Laptop Per Child. That is essentially the message of this Forbes post by Tim Worstall:
“It can be true that a developing country should just skip an entire level or stage of economic development. For example, it’s now pretty certain that no African country is ever going to have a land line telephone network as do the industrialised countries. Building a mobile network is so much cheaper than sending wire to every house that that land line network is simply never going to be built.
What’s caught my eye today is that it’s possible that Africa is also going to skip the entire PC revolution as well. Instead of Microsoft’s Windows on PCs or even netbooks, it could be that they’ll just leap to Google’s Android on smart phones.”
In fact, I would go a step further: I think it is entirely possible that Africa will go directly for tablets, which are both more sturdy than PCs and more useful for office work than smart phones. Come to think of it, it would be nice if some impact evaluators were to undertake an RCT of the relative impacts of smart phones and tablet computers in firms.