Final thoughts

Final Words

What we need is a Signal (by Carsten Schröder)

Middle/end of September in Cologne (Germany) an Amiga Fair will be held, I am sorry to say that actually it is a (small) Amiga section on a (big) Macintosh event. A few days after this announcement Amiga Plus, the only Amiga magazine in the German language that you can buy in shops, discloses that in future it will only be available via subscription.

These two incidents unfortunately strike to the root, that as time slips by the Amiga market has slid down where the Atari has been scraping along for some time - at the rim of absolute insignificance.

In the hope of an Amiga successor we used to boast of the important strategic advantage of a quite large number of users, developers and distributors - this could have promoted the distribution of a new Amiga substantially. But practically overnight there is nothing left of this:

• The number of users is, as we must recognize, not even big enough to distribute a periodical profitably in shops or to organize an independent Amiga show.


• There appear nearly no new programs or software versions, and even those few cannot compete with the programs on other operating systems - just look at the Amiga WWW browsers and wordprocessors, which limp miles behind their PC competitors - and the distance increases.


• A wide area network of Amiga-specialized distributors is more or less non existent any more - at this time at most 20 percent of users can find a distributor in the neighbourhood.

My point: The efficient infrastructure advantage, which AMIGA in the past had over its competitors, for instance Be and QNX, is fading away. It obviously lies in the hands of the enterprise to establish an Amiga successor in the market and install the necessary structures, for example, distribution.

Unfortunately the recent Amiga leadership is not completely blameless for this calamity. Certainly, the decline of Amiga mostly happened before the year 2000 - but it rather has sped up in the last one-and-a-half years. The finger must point to the still not clear strategy and the, it must be stated without any exaggeration, completely unacceptable information policy of AMIGA. And right here is the key for a possible improvement in the future. At the upcoming Cologne fair AMIGA must put it on the line:

Public relations must be on full bore. The company must say what strategies they follow and when those AmigaDE versions with these features for that operating system will be marketed. It must be made clear that development of desktop versions of the AmigaDE is in progress and that the software is more than a multimedia extension for operating systems.

On this message the compamy will be assessed. Should the course of AMIGA in the future not show a clear line or should announcements or schedules released in Cologne not be followed, then the company has - sorry, but rightly - forfeited its reputation - apart from the fact, that for Amiga in this case probably there will be no rescue at all.

With this until next month,

yours

Carsten Schröder