At the end

The success of a product is not done by its technology alone

Last year in November on the show in Cologne, three months before Jeff Schinder was replaced as president of the R&D department, the company established a cooperation with the, at that time, completely unknown QNX Software Systems Ltd., that should create the operating system of the 'Next Generation Amiga'. After the decision was made public there were rumours, that QNX was just second choice and that Amiga, Inc. had preferred a cooperation with BeOS, that failed in the last minute. Other speculations were that the development department just established a cooperation with QNX, because the criticism from the community about the standstill became louder and louder.

Be it as it is, QNX was elected and the Amiga community was happy - and it seems it was rightly so: The specifications were great, a real time operating system of this manufacturer seemed to be ideal with the Amiga philosophy - maybe, that also Jeff Schindler thought that. At that time everybody considered the technology, but no one considered the - in the computerbusiness very important - situation on the market, and it is obvious, that even the former president of the development department didn't.

The current AMIGA president Jim Collas was previously Senior Vice President with Gateway and was in a high position, that was based not only on technical knowledge: Jim Collas led an important department within a big computer company. For this job he also needed qualities as a manager, that means economic knowledge. Now, we know, that the AMIGA president is aware of one basic thing: If a product is successful is not just the result - maybe it is the least important point - of the quality, but a number of other factors. Basically this should be understood by anybody, who has a responsible job in the computer business - the best example is the company of a certain Bill G., that has on the computer software market nearly a monopoly, even if their programs are in the opinion of most people just a little better than middle class.

Jim Collas had two alternatives:

a) AMIGA stays with the tiny company QNX with the maybe better kernel resp. operating system, for which there is nearly no software support, so that a market for that had to be created, first. How difficult this can be, can be understood by any Amiga user using the Amiga-PowerPC as an example: The PowerUp boards sold (as one of the reasons) bad, because there was just a little number of high quality programs - and these didn't exist, because the PowerUp boards were sold badly.

If AMIGA had stayed with QNX, they had to do gigantic efforts to convince enough known software manufacturers to port their programs to the new Amiga operating sysstem. But in times where most manufacturers also support three, five or more operating systems the majority of the companies would not have convinced for supporting another freak system, that it would have been at least in the beginning.

Without a software base large enough maybe the majority of Amiga users would have swapped to the AmigaNG, maybe also some users of other alternative platforms, but it is unlikely, that a big mass of Linux-, Mac and unhappy Windows users would have swapped.

b) AMIGA swaps to a Linux kernel, even if this might result in a less individual and revolutionary operating environment (what has to be found out first). But then there is the big world of Linux programs - and maybe more important - hardware drivers, which can be adjusted to the AmigaNG without big efforts not to mention the gigantic potential of Linux developers made available to the computer system.

So it will be much easier for the software manufacturers make a decision to support the AmigaNG as this would have been possible when using the QNX kernel. A first hint on thi matter is the publication of the cooperation between AMIGA and Corel, that would not have been possible when using QNX.

To put both alternatives to the point:

a) AmigaNG <=> a computer system with very much individuality, but little chances on the market

b) AmigaNG <=> a computer system with (maybe) less individuality, but much better chances on the market

The AMIGA president decided for the last one and I personally can understand that very good. Of course, there are Amiga users, that would have accepted less chances on the market. Well, they can choose the competing system of Phase 5 (if it should enter the market), but they should not complain, if it became a freak-only system as the Classic-Amiga, but without a large range of attractive hardware and software, later.

So, see you next month,

yours

Carsten Schroeder