This week brought the news that IBM and Canonical have partnered on a suite of very inexpensive desktop applications aimed at netbooks for businesses in Africa. The suite of software runs on Canonical's Ubuntu Linux operating system, and, as CNet's Lance Whitney notes, offers open-standards-based e-mail, word processing, a spreadsheet application, communication tools, and social-networking features. There will also be features allowing users to collaborate in the cloud.
If you look at the pricing model for this offering in conjunction with the low prices of netbooks, this sounds like a very viable way to offer users good functionality while avoiding the much greater expense of Windows-based systems equipped with proprietary applications. In fact, as I've been reading the details of the plan, I wonder why the folks behind the beleagured One Laptop for Child initiative didn't see this coming.
