| From: | 2mas |
| Date: | 08 Apr 00 at 12:52:04 |
| Subject: | Re: Survey on OS for M@tabox Boards |
On Sat, 8 Apr 2000, Rajnai Almos wrote:
> Hello!
>
> On 7 Apr 00, at 16:13, 2mas wrote:
>
> > How many do they have to sell to make it profitable?
> > I don't really know _anyone_ that want to buy yet another addon CPU card
> > for their Amiga. Not to be negative, but most of my friends which still
> > use their Amiga have either started to use a PC besides as HW for them are
> > a whole lot cheaper or they have (like me) already bought a PPC card and
> > are not interested in buying a new CPU card.
>
> I know a LOT of people, who just waiting for a G3/G4 board without
> M68k. They did not bought PPC card because of this.
Well, that's great! Because nothing would be better than selling those
cards by the thousands. I based my email on my experience with
users here in Oslo, Norway. I think I know most of the Amiga users here at
the university (atleast those who are still active), most of them have a
060 card, or even PPC w/060 and I know they don't want to pay for a new
computer-in-computer (coz that's more or less what the card is), but the
interesting fact is that most of them are willing to pay a whole lot more
for a new "Amiga" and that goes for several people I know that have put
their Amiga in the attic (and those far outnumber the active users).
I sincerely hope that H&P succeed in pushing everything over to a PPC only
system and that they make their software run on some open licensed
platform so we can have cheap and readily available hardware.
I would easily let myself be persuaded to whip out 2-3000 GBP for a good
SMP dual PPC box w/Warpup and some really nice hardware, as a matter of
fact one of the companies I work for, which specializes on seismic
reservoar evaluation don't care about wether they can run Windows or not,
they want fast machines for numeric calculations. Right now we are in the
process of evaluating a 100+ number machines just for _one_ boat, whereas
they have tens of boats and they said they would want a PPC based platform
if possible as Intel is not very good on floats and are harder to program
in assembler. The OS must be efficient and stable. Other than that they
don't care because the rest of the software would be written in-house from
scratch. Historically this is a very Sun biased company, but is
considering switching to a PPC based platform if a good one will be
released as most probarly know Sun hardware is good, but it's rather
expensive and more often than not you would have to use Suns add-on
hardware...Sell a PPC based platform and ship it with WarpOS to a few
companies like that and you have a good baseline to evolve from as low-end
users would probarly buy the cheapest available PCs anyway..
I think it would be easier to sell a little expensive workstation as long
as you offer something different/better than standard PCs with the whole
world as your market instead of selling only to a very small group.
I would think Motorola would _very_ much like to take back the superiority
they enjoyed earlier. With the rise of LINUX maybe something interesting
will show up here ;)
.ThOm@s!