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Technology Stocks : Nokia (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (4110)	4/11/2000 8:59:00 AM
From: tero kuittinen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

Part of it may be due to the high PC internet market penetration rate in America - maybe consumers don't need text messaging in their phones if they have PC's both in their homes and in their offices. But the real problem here is the standard fragmentation: four digital networks, none of them covering even 10% of the population. This is like having four incompatible e-mail networks: one for Compaq, one for IBM, one for Apple and one for Toshiba. Of course e-mail would never have taken off under these circumstances. And American consumers are now sensibly shunning phone-based messaging services - after all, they can't reach their friends and colleagues with any of the current standards. In contrast, an Italian consumer can reach 60% of other Italians when he buys a phone. If he buys a Nokia with predictive text input, picture messaging, an option for sending ringtones to friends, etc - he can actually use these features for communicating with most of other Italians. Not just 7%. This is that old American rule about how the worth of a network grows geometrically as the number of users goes up. But American analysts refuse to employ this rule when it comes to digital mobile networks - because they know that this means that Sprint, Motorola, etc. are at a disadvantage compared to their European rivals. So you see this network rule mentioned in almost every article on Hot Mail or Cisco - but almost never when it comes to evaluating GSM. Tero