From: taylorj@gaia.ecs.csus.edu (Jon Taylor) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc Subject: The Amiga is finally dying for real Date: 9 Sep 1997 04:46:33 GMT Organization: California State University Sacramento Lines: 223 Message-ID: Reply-To: taylorj@gaia.ecs.csus.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: taylorj@gaia.ecs.csus.edu X-Newsreader: slrn (0.9.3.2 UNIX) Path: 195.95.96.10!news.unisource.be!planetinternet.be!newsgate.unisource.nl!newsgate.cistron.nl!het.net!Cabal.CESspool!bofh.vszbr.cz!news.maxwell.syr.edu!nntp.info.ucla.edu!134.139.1.31!csulb.edu!csus.edu!taylorj In this (very long) post, I hope to show convincingly that there is no longer any market for Amigas, and that any attempt to revive, reconstruct, or in any way bring back the glory days of the Amiga is doomed to failure. I have been waiting since the early nineties for the Amiga to be reborn in some form, but I have come to the conclusion that any chance for this has come and gone. My reasons for thinking this way are given below. First, though, I want the readers of this group to know that I do not dislike Amigas or Amiga users. I used an Amiga for many many years, learned a hell of a lot from it, and still think it is 'the coolest computer ever'. However, when in late 1997 I see people still trying to promote them as a long-term viable general computing platform, a SERIOUS reality check is in order. So here goes.... Broadly speaking, the computer market is divided up into three submarkets: High-end workstations (usually UNIX-based), PCs (Windows or Mac), and game consoles (supercomputers can be safely ignored here, I think). These divisions are a reflections of the types of people who purchase computers and their needs - Highly technical folk such as scientists and engineers buy the high-priced proprietary workstations, businesses and the better-off hacker types or game players buy PCs, and Joe Sixpack buys an ultra-simple game console. Any chance the Amiga had of becoming a viable 'color macintosh' and being used by business in any sort of serious bulk was dead and buried by 1990. What small segment of the business community would even then have considered anything besides a windows PC then would have bought a Macintosh. And now? Apple, which C= could never even have touched as far as market presence, is on its deathbed. Wintel has won, and no one seriously considers any other sort of machine for general business purposes. Same for 'creative computing' and NTSC video massaging a la the Video Toaster - Newtek has all but abandoned the Amiga, killing it in that market. Therefore, any Amiga successor which has more in common with the old Amigas than the name would have to sell to either the high-end workstation people or the Nintendo crowd. There just isn't anywhere else to go anymore. In terms of customer profile, the Amiga never really was much more than a game console with a keyboard. The bulk of all Amiga sales, ever, were A500-class machines, and they sold so many primarily because they were cheap, powerful game-playing machines. Hell, Jay Miner originally designed the Amiga custom chips for use in a game console! Those low-end bulk sales were what kept C= from going belly-up in ~1989 instead of years later. Given this, the obvious thing for C= to have done in 1990 when it became clear that Wintel would eventually take over all of its market segment would have been to morph the Amiga into a killer game console. At the time it was still, in terms of hardware capability, quite superior to the competition (SNES and Sega Genesis). AGA would have given the Amiga a commanding lead in the market, generating the revenue stream necessary for further chipset development. Instead, it made a half-assed (CD32) attempt at this years after it should have been done, and it was practically stillborn. Nowadays we have the N64 and PSX, which are essentially impossible for anything based on the Amiga (some would say anything else, period) to compete with. So, that market segment is now closed as well. The only market segment left is the workstation market. Forget it. Not only is this market segment highly vertical and composed almost entirely of long-established players like HP, Sun, IBM, DEC, etc., but there is a real question about if this segment will even exist at all in five more years. The wintel duopoly is very agressively moving into this market, and even if they aren't totally successful they will eat the low end off, further raising the barriers to entry. I have not mentioned network computers yet, primarily because I don't see NCs as a distinct market segment from game consoles. Drop a JavaOS cartridge in a N64, attach a modem and you have a (good, fast) NC. Indeed, the only possible reason I can fathom for GW2K's purchase of the Amiga technology is to rip out the AGA chipset, dump everything else (including the OS) and slap it into an el cheapo NC. I'm certain they aren't under any illusions about being able to produce next-generation Amiga *computers*, because they surely know that almost no one would buy them aside from the few remaining Amiga fanatics with money. At this point they'd have to rebuild the brand image from scratch, just about, as well as overcoming *negative* brand-association with the 'Amiga' name as a 'toy' computer that people used when they were kids and no one has even heard much about for years! The very idea is ludicrous! Why would they do that when they can take the hardware and make an NC out of it, and everyone will already know what an NC is anyway? No one buys anything but Wintel boxes or Macs anymore in enough quantity to make selling them even close to worth it. As a top-10 PC clone vendor, this cannot have escaped GW2K. They didn't get to their position in the PC clone world by being anything but marketing gurus, and no one with any marketing experience could possibly look over the past and current state of the Amiga market and see anything salvageable. They are, IMHO, almost certainly stringing the remaining Amiga community along, counting on their fanatical (and quite mindless at this stage) loyalty to the Amiga to sell enough A1200s and A4000s to recoup at least some of their investment in the Amiga purchase. This is very mean, but it is also *VERY* smart marketing. GW2K has had designs on the home couch-potato market for years now (witness their Destination systems), and since it has become obvious that NCs are what these folk will use, they will be looking to get out of the gate early with their own NC. The Amiga purchase cannot possible make them any serious profits any other way, with the possible addition of suing over licensing of the patents. What about the A/Box? Well, Capirhana would make a wondeful core to build an NC around, but as far as Phase 5's plans to build a full-fledged computer around it I am highly dubious. Even if they manage to not slip their development schedule anymore, they would then have to decide if they *really* want to continue along the very shaky and uncertain path of developing a full-fledged OS and producing a full-fledged computer with dubious saleability, thereby taking a chance on losing all the time, effort and money spent on developing Capirhana, or they could decide to build their own NC around it or license it to OEMs, thereby taking a potentially commanding lead in the soon to be hyperbooming NC market. It does NOT take a brain surgeon to see which is the least risky path. There will almost certainly never be an A/Box computer, but I would be very surprised not to eventually see an NC with Phase5 chip technology of some kind in it. Finally, there is the matter of PIOS One. This is the future-Amiga development branch most likely to succeed, mostly because it is actually based on real market analysis and does not depend on the Amiga community for sales. However, even with that I am still less than 50% confident it will ever take off. The future viability of the PowerPC/CHRP platform, which looked pretty good for a while, is starting to not look so good after all. Apple may very well take the entire market down with it, and at the very least Apple's current backpedaling on the cloning issue has cast a cloud over the whole PPC field. Also, as time goes by the anti-Wintel forces are shifting their plan of attack to be based more and more around NCs, further draining motivational energy out of this market segment. Also as time goes by, Intel (which now makes the motherboard, CPU, and chipsets in all PCs sold) gets more and more time to catch up to PPC/CHRP designs. They started out in the early nineties with a hell of technical lead over Intel and have managed to piss away almost all of it since then. PPC CPUs may very well survive in NCs (likely, I would say), but the desktop computer aspect is looking increasingly grim. Forget the hardware, some of you will say. AmigaOS will survive, and that is what *really* is the soul of the Amiga. Leaving aside the question of whether it was the hardware, the OS or both (or neither!) that constituted the soul of the Amiga, what possible market could there be for an OS that has no virtual memory, is primarily written in 68k assembly and is thus highly unportable, and which is optimized around a specific hardware platform (OCS/ECS/AGA)? The demand wouldn't be there, to put it mildly. Also, the only really viable nontraditional OS these days is Linux, which already runs on damn near anything, is very technically advanced, is currently developing at a very rapid pace, and is free. Kinda hard (impossible, maybe) to compete with that. In sum, we are far beyond the point of no return for the Amiga or any of its potential successors as any sort of long-term viable computing platform. If the Amiga had been quickly snapped up after Commodore's demise by a well-run company that would have marketed the hell out of it and moved forward on the hardware and the OS right away, MAYBE the Amiga could have been saved. But that did not happen, and everyone here knows the painful soap opera that ensued instead. That soap opera was the final nail in the Amiga's coffin. I suspected as much when things did not get resolved and moving forward soon after Commodore's demise, but now I am convinced. Too many users have moved on, too many software houses have folded up shop or moved to Mac/Wintel (especially the game makers, which were always the core of the Amiga software market), the Amiga has lost almost all of what meager brand-name recognition it once had (especially in the US), and the few remaining hardware vendors are quite obviously using (of course they will deny this - they have to in order to keep Amigans buying their products for just a *little* longer) the remaining Amiga users with purchasing power to refine their peripheral designs a little bit more before jumping into the PCI-based (and many, many times more lucrative and *stable*) Wintel component market. What marketing director in their right mind could possible see anything salvageable in all of this chaos and wreckage? The fanatical devotion of the Amiga community carried the window of viability of the platform forward for years, but the batteries look to be finally, slowly, and painfully wearing out. The technically-minded folk on csam seems to have realized this and left for greener pastures, as evidenced by the DRAMATIC fall in the quality of technical arguments I have seen here. When I was an Amiga geek, way back when, we may have been put down by the PC morons but at least they didn't fault us for our technical knowledge. In contrast, I lost count of the number of anti-PC/pro-Amiga arguments I saw in csam during my recent readthrough where the pro-Amiga folk quite obviously knew very little about the current state of PC hardware, or for that matter the current state of ANYTHING other than the Amiga market. This was incredibly depressing to me, because it tells me that the *real* 'soul of the Amiga' - the community of knowledgeable Amiga hackers - is finally dying for real, with no new blood to replace those who leave. It is becoming stagnant and inbred, a sure sign of a dying community. Watching people trying over and over again to revive the Amiga *as a computer*, which is NOT going to happen, is a lot like like watching a punch-drunk boxer in the 11th round, staggering and lurching around the ring with his gloves mostly in front of his face to ward off his opponent's incessant pummeling and occasionally taking a wild swing and missing. He's quite obviously going to lose by decision no matter what he does, but he just won't go down and spare himself the pain of having his ass kicked all through the 12th round as well. Why the hell are you folks continuing to prolong this painful farce? Let my beloved Amiga die with what little dignity it has left, for christ's sake! Have some dignity yourselves! At least GW2K might be able to take AGA and make a killer, cheap NC out of it. I'd buy one for sure, even if it wasn't the best on the market, for sentimental reasons if nothing else. At least the Amiga could go out with a bang rather than a whimper. Jon P.S. If (as I suspect) most of you are really hanging on because you get a charge out of being in the small, isolated group that is sure they know the One True Way (TM), you'd get a hell of a lot more positive feedback from becoming a Linux hacker. The Linux/free-software community is going to give it to Microsoft (and most of the rest of the commercial software industry) up the ass with a tent peg over the coming years, and I consider it to be quite a suitable form of revenge most richly deserved for their shoddy treatment of the Amiga throughout its life. Even the Amiga could not have been as fundamentally revolutionary as free software, which may very well wipe out ALL commercial software of any kind whatsoever! The only analog to the electric, fast-moving, and just plain righteous spirit of communal hackerdom that permeates the Linux community right now that I can recall are the 'glory days' (1985-~1990) of the Amiga community. You DO have a home, if you choose to go there.