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Abdul-Muyeed Chowdhury and Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child foundation, have something in common: Both want to bring affordable computing to the developing world. But ask Chowdhury, the director of an organization working to build subsidized cyber cafes across Bangladesh, if his project will use Negroponte's XO, the so-called "hundred-dollar laptop," and he laughs out loud.

"If we could afford to buy one computer per child, we wouldn't be a poor country," he says. "In a country where people make $1 or $2 a day, it doesn't make economic sense for everyone to have their own computer. It makes sense to share them."

Chowdhury's Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) is one of a number of developing world organizations opting against One Laptop Per Child's XO or Intel's competing Classmate PC and taking a different approach to crossing the digital divide between high-tech haves and have-nots. BRAC has outfitted its so-called "telecenters," public computer centers across the country, with $70 devices created by the Redwood City-based nComputing.

NComputing's book-sized devices serve as terminals that divvy up the resources of a computer, allowing as many as 30 people to simultaneously use a single PC, each on separate monitors, without interfering with each others' activities. That sharing system, Chowdhury says, isn't just better for a public cyber café setup--it's also a cheaper, more durable and more energy efficient way to bring computing to his corner of the developing world.

On Monday, nComputing announced a deal to sell 50,000 of its virtual PC terminals to the state of Andhra Pradesh in India, where they'll be distributed among 5,000 schools and used by 1.8 million children. About a year ago, the Macedonian Ministry of Education signed a similar deal to deploy 180,000 nComputing devices in an attempt to give every Macedonian student access to a PC.

Those countries' NGOs and education officials, says nComputing chief executive Stephen Dukker, are catching on to the same technology trend that's sweeping through the IT industry in the U.S.: virtualization. Virtualization allows physical computing resources to be split into separate software "images" that work side by side. The server virtualization technology, for instance, popularized by VMware (nyse: VMW - news - people ) and offered by companies like Citrix (nasdaq: CTXS - news - people ) and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), allows a single server to function as up to 10 "virtual" servers, each running different applications.

NComputing offers a patented version of "desktop virtualization" that partitions the resources of a single PC so that different independent terminals can use them. That means a virtualized nComputing terminal runs far more efficiently than a one-user PC--a device Dukker describes as bloated with unnecessary processing power and memory.

"For years we've been saying that PCs are supercomputers," he says. "But when [people] see how much real-world work PCs are really capable of doing, jaws drop."

In the last 20 months, nComputing has sold 1 million terminals. Seventy percent of those units are deployed in developing countries. That's less than the more than 1.7 million Classmate PCs that Gartner Research estimates Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) has sold to the developing world in the last two years, but more than One Laptop Per Child, which has sold about 700,000 of its machines.

NComputing's Dukker says that's evidence of his device's superior practicality in the developing world. One Laptop Per Child's Nicholas Negroponte, on the other hand, calls putting those numbers side-by-side equivalent to comparing "sneakers and tennis courts" or "bicycles and buses."

The XO, he argues, is designed to be possessed by children beyond the classroom, while nComputing is offering a shared, public model of affordable computing. "If you want to bring a touch of the computer experience, IT savvy, if you will, to each student in a school, the cheapest way is to build computer labs and the least expensive way to do that is nComputing," Negroponte wrote in an e-mail to Forbes.com. "If, by contrast, you want every child to have their own pencil, inside or outside school, that means a laptop, especially if you expect a book and learning experience, inside and outside school."

But nComputing's Dukker says his company's devices pose a direct substitute for the XO. "At the conceptual level, they're right, the two devices are apple and oranges," Dukker says. "The problem is that OLPC poses a solution for the same problem in the same market. It's also considerably more expensive, and they're deceptive about the cost."

Though the XO sells for around $188, Dukker calculates that the transportation, maintenance and energy costs for the machine mean the total price over its lifespan is more than $400. With those hidden expenses--including the cost of the PC that the nComputing devices partition--incorporated into nComputing's price tag, Dukker claims that his units' total cost amounts to a mere $200 each.

Gartner analyst Annette Jump isn't so sure. "With nComputing, I doubt that the cost will be that low," she says. "They still need to maintain the devices, purchase the backend computer and license the software."

Negroponte also takes issue with nComputing's numbers, pointing out that in the developing world the cost of connectivity often dwarfs all other costs after the initial purchase. And he adds that any comparison on price is spurious, given the different aims of the two organizations. "If you take any cost and multiple people share it, the cost will be lower," Negroponte says. "So I never know what [nComputing is] really after when they quote numbers."

BRAC's Chowdhury echoes Negroponte's point that it's not a matter of comparing the devices' costs so much as how they're used--nComputing's orientation toward public, shared computers versus Negroponte's ownership model. And that's why his organization has chosen nComputing, he adds. In a country as poor as Bangladesh, Chowdhury argues there simply aren't enough PCs to go around.

"It's a question of sharing," he says. "In rural areas, having your own laptop computer, or having your own desktop computer, either is a luxury. People there don't even have a desk."

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