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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (79062)	4/14/1999 2:47:00 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Respond to of 186894

Tenchusatsu, I paid a little bit less, but got a good deal becuase my service provider wanted to get me off the old analog unit and offered a good upgrade. The 6162 is NOT the most expensive thing around either. But the important thing to note is that even with all the "free" phones being given out, NOK, ERICY and MOT are still making good money on the products they sell and so are their various component suppliers. The fact that these phones are "free" doesn't mean that nobody made a profit on producing them. Finally, I think there's a MAJOR problem with the "free PC" model. Namely, it presumes that most PCs are sold primarily for internet use. While that is certainly the biggest driver of new purchases in the home market in recent years, (the second biggest is games) it is overall a small piece of the pie. Most PCs are still sold to businesses and used for purposes other than surfing the net. Even when they ARE used for net access at the office, they usually need to do so on the terms dictated by the owning business (proxy server, firewall, etc.), NOT by dialup to some ISP. So to my mind, a sales model which depends on your ISP buying you a PC and recouping it on advertising is limited to a small segment of the market. Perhaps even too small to be viable and in any case a segment which is likely to go to "internet boxes" of some sort in any case. What we're likely to see instead are a lot of "hybrid" models for home buyers. Where a manufacturer designs the PC to favor certain sites or features and receives a kickback from the service providers. In the commercial arena even this is unlikely to float. This, of course, is very different from the cellphone world. There's only one thing you can do with a cellphone and only one way to use it, so the "razor blade" model works well.