Sitting at home watching some trashy TV one of the last things I expected was a PC World advert being the most memorable part of the evening. To be fair, PC World was simply the messenger with Orange being the real heroes with their "inventive", subscribe to our broadband service and get a free laptop offer!
Hmmm, something sounds very familiar.
So its no secret that mobile phones have increasingly becoming more like mini computers, now it seems that laptops are being sold like mobile phones.
The deal is, subscribe to Orange broadband for 24 months and you can have a shiny new laptop! So a bit of digging around, and it seems they are not the only ones as AOL have just announced something very similar. So first question, can you upgrade to a better model? Well of course you can. You'd probably want to for that matter as the basic model seems a bit dodgy, but the business model certainly sounds like a winner. Question 2, how comes its taken this long to happen? Well certainly one of the main reasons is that its taken this long for laptops to come down in price to make it a viable option, and the other being that its taken this long for broadband to become pervasive enough so that this deal would appeal to the entry level consumer. All in all, sounds like the broadband battleground is going to considerably heat up.
As for who will win? My bet is to look to the telcos. They've been offering these kind of packages for years and are sure to be able to leverage their expertise of using this business model. Not only that, but with companies like Virgin already offering combined packages it seems like a no brainer to roll in all the kit you'll ever need with it...Although of course, in a few years time for the average user maybe that will only be one device anyway, but it sure is easier to set yourself up as an ISP than it is to launch as mobile provider.
1 comments:
You write very well.
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