Cutting the cost of computing

My institute's magazine plopped onto the doormat yesterday and I was pleased to see this article about the one laptop per child project. I blogged about it previously.
The piece goes into more details about the number of territories who are bypassing traditional business IT models and adopting a more open source model. It reminded me of something that's been evident in India with their post-production market. Essentially they avoided the first couple of generations of non-linear editing technology and pretty much all of the developments of the nineties and have plunged into data-driven workflows (particularly DI for film). I wonder if this will be mirrored in other areas of technology as what was the third world becomes the tiger economies of the twenty-first century?
Essentially they let the USA/Europe make the mistakes and when the technology has been shaken down it's ready for them.