[+] - - - - - The Fine Line of Affordability

"Make it inexpensive. My friend Paul Polak has adapted a famous quote to the following: 'Affordability isn’t
everything, it’s the only thing' and there’s a lot of truth in that. When you
are designing for people who are earning just one or two dollars a day, you
need to keep things as cheap as you can and then make it even cheaper!"

"Embrace market mechanisms (Giving stuff away rarely works as well as selling it.)"
- Ethan Zuckerman’s post ‘Innovating from constraint‘

We seem to have two conflicting pieces of sound advice; but actually the two ideas give us a guideline. The experience shared by these two social innovators actually
provides a rare set of guard rails for designers and engineers. These two
pieces of advices cut off the wilderness territories of negative infinity and
positive infinity and leave you with the optimal are to focus you attention. It's
a chance to bowl with the bumpers up.

Ever play the Chinese game Go (Wei Qi?) It has very few rules: players alternate putting pieces on the board. The pieces do not move for the rest of the game. The player with more
spaces on the board wins. So how do you even start? In contrast, Chess has a
very strict system of rules controlling the movement of each piece and only one
goal, the King. Chess is easier, at least to learn. By having less options, you
can focus more clearly on the goal.

Thus, Polak and Zuckerman have outlined what I would like to call The Fine Line of Affordability. It's hard to make something under $2 and then still market it. But it's harder to
make something that costs any amount.