Final thoughts
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Final thoughts
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I did not expect wonders from the show at St. Louis. I firmly believed that AMIGA's prevailing strategy, which I agreed with and still believe to be the gold standard, would be developed consistently. But everything has changed.
A few days later, I am lost for words about the future of the Amiga DE, because I gained the impression that the three most important people at AMIGA, Bill McEwen, Fleecy Moss and Gary Peake, speak about three different projects when they describe the AmigaDE. According to Bill McEwen's statements, the planning of AmigaDE has changed radically: he mentioned only PDAs and other small devices as well as »Content«.
What is heard from Fleecy Moss sounds much less dramatic, and Gary Peake says: "There is no change at all".
So what is going on? I simply cannot tell if those three are just talking about different aspects of the same design, or if there is a change of planning for AmigaDE behind all of this - and I am definitely not the only one who feels like this.
Certainly it is my opinion that the change of course, which - at least this is a a matter of fact - was ushered in with the announcement of a PowerPC native version of the AmigaOS, was a serious mistake by AMIGA.
Resources will be used up on another completely new operating system - a PowerPC native AmigaOS version can be nothing else - which I cannot see has any chance in the market. Who, please, needs to buy this OS?
So far I have not been able to discover a single feature so extraordinary that users of other operating systems would be induced to change to PowerPC AmigaOS. We ignore at our peril that most users work with an x86 machine and are not prepared to buy an obviously more expensive PowerPC computer, upon which in an emergency - say, the PowerPC AmigaOS failed - they could not even install the Windows standard.
And given that consideration, why would a software producer port programs for the PowerPC AmigaOS?
In short: I am very pessimistic about the chances of the planned PowerPC native AmigaOS. Though we are told the AmigaOS will get Memory Protection starting with version 5 and be "merged" with the AmigaDE, for me this begs the question: "How?". Remember that memory protection software was announced for the 68k AmigaOS several years ago, realization of which finally proved impossible. And the merging of two operating systems could likewise lead to serious problems.
Personal conclusion: Before St. Louis AMIGA pursued a simple, but ingenious idea: With AmigaDE an operating system was to be created which offered platform independence at the binary level, hence being able to run upon nearly all processors (and even hosted on extraneous operating systems), but nevertheless fast.
The latest announcements of a PowerPC AmigaOS, which some day and somehow will be combined with the AmigaDE, sound to me anything but well thought out and raise lots of questions concerning realization. The past - and here especially the example of BeOS, certainly not a bad product, and for some time now distributed free of charge - has shown that an operating system can stay in the market only if it really has unrivalled features. With best intentions I cannot see the particular appeal of the planned PowerPC AmigaOS.
Whether in the future I'll be able to believe in a »New Amiga« will mainly depend on whether the AmigaDE is realized in the way it was planned originally. If this does not happen, and AmigaDE only serves as a content supplier for PDAs and handheld devices, and not realized as a scalable, platform independent operating system, before long I'll have to rethink my commitment to the Amiga. Because without a view of the future I'll not have any motivation.
Best regards,
yours
Carsten Schroeder
