How about a free PC? All you have to do is use the Internet. It may seem odd, but giving away hardware, or subsidising it heavily, to get consumers onto the Net has become a clearly-defined movement in the United States. The origins of the trend are with a couple of online marketing companies that last year offered free PCs to people who came to their website, filled out a lengthy lifestyles questionnaire, and then were willing to keep a software program on their computer desktop that would allow the company to feed the presumably happy recipient a barrage of product and service pitches.
This subtle shift in perception of how the Web might come to function as a consumer medium and the importance of a device to access that medium reflects what many Net pragmatists have been predicting for some time. It underlines the intensely consumerist culture that surrounds us and parallels the trend in another electronic medium with consumerist functions in the US - cable television.
Years ago US cable executives realised the prospective audience to which they could market services and programmes was worth the relatively small price of a subsidy for the costs of the hardware that allows access to cable programmes.
Unlike here, in North America cable companies install a small set-top unit on your TV when you subscribe to cable services and that metal box decodes the set of programmes you've paid to receive.
The box is so commonplace most Americans don't realise it would cost £100 or so to purchase. And that's the whole point - they don't need to think about buying an additional piece of hardware because the cable operators would rather lend it to them and get them buying programme packages.
They hope that once consumers see the services on offer they might opt for pay-per-view events and premium movie channels. And people do.
Thus we return to the Web, and why the free PC trend demonstrates the Internet's shift from a playground for geeks to a bona fide consumer medium. It's worth pointing out that one of the reasons the trend seems so strange is that we are still limiting our concept of the PC to a large desktop machine. Such an item would be a major purchase for most homes and the idea of receiving one free just for looking at adverts or going online is startling indeed.
But scaled-down entry-level PCs which are Netready in the US are now available starting at just above $400 (€391) from a company called Emachines, which is one of the partners in the current set of free PC deals. The other partner is Internet access giant, AOL, which through its subsidiary CompuServe will offer a $400 rebate to consumers who buy an Emachine and sign up with CompuServe for three years. Three of the biggest computer retail chains in the US, Circuit City, CompUSA and Best Buy, are flogging the deal. The PCs thus aren't quite free, but no one seems to be complaining at this slight misnomer.
The deal signals that PC manufacturers can underwrite some of the costs of low-margin machines by doing a deal with Internet service providers (ISPs). This might seem curious at the moment, when consumer subscriptions are hardly a lucrative source of income for ISPs, but the assumption is that subscribers will become increasingly valuable as a captive consumer market.
The deal also heralds the move away from seeing the PC as a luxury item which also enables Internet access, to seeing stripped-down machines primarily as high-level Internet access devices which also allow purchasers to enjoy other PC functions.
The trend flags the shift towards ubiquitous Internet access. Analysts have been predicting for some time that PCs will not be the primary vehicle for getting on the Net in the future - you'll probably use a range of devices, from mobile phones to screens built into telephones or small stand-alone devices.
One can imagine that the ISPs of tomorrow will offer such devices free or at low cost to encourage consumers to sign up for online services. This poses some interesting opportunities for ISPs and promises lots of possibilities for Net-going consumers in the future.
Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie
