Oh won't somebody please think of the children?

Delivering delight to a child, however small a wonder, is popular and profitable. Nintendo made a fortune and a near monopoly by utilizing older technology in new and innovative ways to make something new. The world sorely needs more of those kinds of ideas.

One thing that Nintendo has missed the boat on, as far as I’m concerned, is philanthropy. And this is frustrating because of their profits. It is a far cry from Folding@home, the Sony program which voluntarily utilizes PS3 horsepower to tackle real world problems. Microsoft’s creator has been most benevolent in his actions. Yet Nintendo always profits on their machines, and it's important to remember how hard it is for companies to make money on consoles themselves.

Literally, the actions by these companies can save lives, and has saved lives. These are not idle entertainment cogs, money invested in these machines has saved lives. Whether it is another cog in terms of publicity (and thus more money) is irrelevant. The point of the matter is that Nintendo has made the Wii.

The Wii is profitable. It sips power like a supermodel. It is rugged in comparison to its fellow systems.

And friends, it costs Nintendo next to nothing to make. What IBM (holla!) has done is created a chipset that can handle if not impressive gaming, then at least versatile programming from a variety of inputs. Nintendo has shown that a microcomputer can be profitable, because in essence they have a microcomputer.

The holy grail of today’s computer manufacturer is a computer that can be sold to countries where companies like Merril Lynch and Lehman represent more than the total combined income of all its citizens. It is these markets and these children for whom education is a survival mechanism. From Chicago to Haiti to Venezuela, information helps.

And then there’s one Laptop per Child. What a mess that thing is. Without going into too much detail, a bunch of Linux nerds build a computer on the cheap with the intention of selling it around the world. It has not approached profitability or reliability by any stretch of the definitions. It is a catastrophic failure.

Flash memory has decreased dramatically in price. Solid state hard drives for larger storage are still unfeasible, but the prices of storage needed to run the global standard efficiently (approx 10 gb of storage, and 512 RAM) with a decent bus speed are found in playthings!

I am not saying the Wii is the computer that could get into the hands of every child. It just baffles me when I see companies like HP and Dell and OLPC attack this market that IBM and Nintendo have built a working model of a quality.mini-computer and made more than a dime on it.

We have a unique opportunity. In the late 80’s and early 90’s Nintendo made a fortune buying off Sharp’s over-production of LCD’s, utilizing Gunpei Yokoi’s model for using existing technology in new and innovative ways. Today, we face a global market where demand for larger, clearer LCD’s is the technology standard, with production prices skyrocketing downwards. Companies such as Sony and Toshiba now outsource their screens to Samsung and Sharp, respectively. The cost of business has become so low for certain companies that it makes less sense for some of the biggest names in the industry to run their own screen production.

So when I hear about One Laptop Per Child, I look over at my Wii, as underpowered as it is compared to its competitors, and realize that for many children all over the world, we could use a little Gunpei Yokoi. Impressive amounts of tech stare me in the face, horsepower at the ready. It pains me to see Nintendo follow Apple into the realm of profitable bilking, compromising features for style, compassion for cool, and limited third party support. That’s less a revolution, and more just a game cube.