EnigmA Amiga Run 1997 July/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 20 (1997)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1997-07 & 08][EAR-CD IV].iso/lightwave/cgplwlist/cgplw07501-07750.txt/[e-mail]_Sun Jul 2 11:34:22 PDT 1995.msg

Text File | 1995-08-06 | 4KB | 76 lines

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From: [e-mail] (Joseph Crowe)
Subject: Re: PCs - i`m sick of hearing about `em!!
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: jcrowe@zaphod (Joseph Crowe)
Reply-To: "[e-mail]"
Organization: Tandem Computers Inc.
References: <3qllf5$[e-mail]> <3rcg05$[e-mail]>
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 1995 17:37:13 GMT
Lines: 60

In article <3rcg05$[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (John Gregor) writes:
|>
|> >users?, this newsgroup is being dominated by complaining PC users. Keep it
|>
|> Get used to it.  It will become more and more so in the future as people
|> continue to move away from the Amiga.
|>
|> The Amiga may have had a nicer architecture than the PC will ever have,
|> and it may have a nicer operating system than WinNT or Win95, but that
|> just isn't sufficient in today's market.
|>
|> The trouble is that by the time LW 5.0 is released, instead of PCs being 5
|> or 10 times as fast as Amigas, they will be 50 or 100 times as fast, much
|> cheaper, and there will be even fewer vendors supporting the Amiga than
|> there are now, so virtually all the applications will be PC based.  If you
|> talk to Newtek employees privately, they express doubt that LW 5.0 will
|> even be released for the Amiga at all.  If the PC version is selling more
|> copies in several days than the Amiga version sells in a year, it is just
|> simple economics - it isn't profitable to continue to invest in a dead
|> platform when those same resources could be put into improving the PC and
|> other versions of the software.  And, as you may have seen from all the
|> comments about LW on TRS-80s, there comes a time when platforms are just
|> too slow to compete, no matter how nice their environment may be.  It
|> doesn't take long for a platform to reach that point.

John, et. al.,

     You make some good points WRT the PC vs. Amiga economics but I question
the validity of your projections.  Of course, nobody can predict with any validity,
what will happen in the future, but if Escom does develop and expand AmigaOS
and put it on a more modern system architecture as proposed by Dave Haynie, I
don't believe it will suffer in comparison to PCs WRT performance.  OTOH, I
must wonder why NewTek does not port LW to the PowerMacs?  The new ones,
based on the PowerPC 604 at 132Mhz certainly have the horsepower and make use
of the PCI bus and will run Windows.  They can certainly give the low-end workstations
a run for the money in terms of performance/$.
|>
|> So don't complain about LW moving to the PC.  At least it is keeping the
|> program viable.  Otherwise, it would have died with the Amiga, as so many
|> other Amiga applications did.  At least it is available now and continues
|> to live.  Without moving to the PC (PC Toaster/PC Lightwave/etc.) Newtek
|> likely would not have survived the ever-shrinking Amiga market.  Crying
|> about how LW is becoming a PC program won't change reality.  The market
|> cares about economics, price/performance, support, and standards, not brand
|> loyalty.

    A good point.  But where is the competition?  Amiga Toaster users and LW
users still do extremely good work, even if the tools are showing their age a bit.
While I agree that the Intel/Cyrix/AMD/NexGen based PCs give the most bang
for the rendering buck right now, I think it may be a bit premature to write off
the Amiga.  I'm certainly open to counterarguments.
|>
|> John
|>
|>
|>

--
Joseph Crowe
[e-mail]