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The Amiga is a fairly stagnant platform. No, it is, bear with me. The thing is
that the 680x0 range of processors has never been upgraded past the '060 and
while there are PowerPC accelerators out there, full use has still not been
taken of them (with the definite exception of Heretic II - now there's a
reason to buy a PPC card if you needed one!). The point is that you can now do
loads of things on an Amiga, with the same basic level of hardware, as
you could ten years ago: MP3, graphical browsing of the web with JavaScript,
true colour graphics, 16-bit sound, CD-R writing and much more. Other
platforms, mentioning no names, have always required you to upgrade your
processor, hard drive space, graphics card and so on to even think of being
able to do these things. Okay, those items are pretty cheap, but even so,
without having the limitation on power than Amiga programmers have, PC (and to
some extent) Mac programmers have got lazy. Their code doesn't have to be
clockspring tight in order to work on a low-end machine. "You haven't got the
very latest hardware? Oh well, never mind, we're sure enough people do to make
us a significant profit, so we don't care."
Application sizes have spiralled from where Windows 3.11 (as an example) came on six high density floppy disks, whereas Windows 2000 will take up 800M of your hard drive space! Is it really so much better? Well, yes it probably is, but can you use it on a ten year old PC? Absolutely not. But who cares? After all, hard disks and memory have never been cheaper and anyone can write a CD, but the focus of this year and next isn't going to be the desktop computer - been there, done that. It's going to be small and palm-shaped. Designed to be carried around everywhere with you. The future isn't going to be three-digit-gigabyte-sized hard drives, it's going to be applications that are small enough to fit in a wristwatch, programs that will only takes hundredths of a second to download from the net because your machine doesn't have any local storage. And guess what? Those bloatware programmers are going to be out on their ears. Who's going to replace them? All those people who can write a web browser that'll fit in a megabyte archive. Those guys that can write an interface for a PDA that takes 300K of disk space. Those guys that can write an application that doesn't require a team of forty programmers to keep track of in development. Amiga programmers, that's who. The future may be bright and orange, but the guys who'll write the software for those future computers won't be PC programmers... |