One reason that a machine like the decTOP can meet the needs of so many users is that the basic functions that Sowah lists are increasingly rolled together into a single, online package.
Like the OLPC laptop, the decTOP's innovations come out of a drive to bring computers and the Internet to rural Africa and Asia: Data Evolution acquired the machine's hardware from Advanced Micro Devices, whose "50x15" program seeks to take 50% of the world's population online by 2015.