The Commodore Amiga: Opinions by it's Users The Amiga computer has been out ever since the Mac first arrived. It features multitasking, enhanced video, enhanced audio, and other neat features. The only thing this computer has been missing is a proper marketing plan. The owner, Commodore Business Machines, was successful the first few years however recently things have been going quite poorly. As a result, I decided to do my final project on the opinions of current Amiga users. I wanted to see if they felt as I did as well as see if other areas of the world were more improved than others. The survey was posted to a world-wide mail system called USENET. Within a week I had over 200 responses from all over the world. It seemed quite successful. When the replies stopped, I wrote some small computer programs to filter the data, which later were calculated by hand for means and standard deviations.... The survey was broad to allow me to choose a variety of questions for the final. Questions I wanted to find out: 1) Is the Amiga as popular in Europe as people say. 2) What do people think of Commodore? 3) What do people think of the Amiga? 4) Which areas of the world buys the most software per user? 5) Is Europe the hot spot for Amiga programming as it appears to be? 6) How many stores in their vicinity sell Amigas? 7) How far are they? 8) Do they get the support they need to use their Amiga? Miscellaneous Questions I asked that didn't pertain to the survey: 1) What to people like to do with their computer? 2) What do they want to do with their computer? 3) How old is the avg. user and how long have they owned an Amiga? 4) City, State, and Country the live 5) How much did they spend on their system? 6) Do their friend have Amigas (which would imply word of mouth advertisement) 7) If they have heard of a program I have written for the Amiga. and finally 8) Do they absolutely love Star Trek? (which I had a hunch they did) When compiling the maps, I decided on 3 different types. One of a world view showing the total survey counts from each county and a "sphere of influence" whose size was dependent on the land areas total value. Another map which I attempted to make "thematic"....the size of the country was solely decided by the amount of surveys it gave. And the last type was of a large scale blow-up map to allow easier chloropleth mapping for the very small countries. I created 10 maps...largely due to the fact that the project will be distributed to Commodore as well the world-wide distribution net. The following is a summary for each map and should be read as the map is viewed: 1) Title map: general info on why I chose the topic 2) Survey count map: each country has it's survey count shown by a chloropleth representation. After, I drew a "sphere of influence" which was a total of an areas results. I chose not to group Canada with the US to allow better comparisons with the smaller Europe. NOTES: notice how Europe's influence is larger than the US's. This should tell Commodore that European sales are just as important as sales in the US. 3) Abstract count map: each countries size is based solely on the total of survey responses. Countries with zero responses were given the smallest land value. Notice how large Scandanavia is compared to the assumed largest Commodore sales areas Denmark and Germany. NOTES: Scandanavia has a large Amiga base that shouldn't be dropped (as Commodore did in Finland only a month ago!) 4) Amiga Approval: notice how most of the world still finds the Amiga an impressivce machine even due to the poor circumstances it faces. This was a rating question from (0-100) 0 being worst. 5) Commodore Approval: notice how low these percentages are. The majority lie near 50%! Approval is incredibly low in Italy and Sweden. This was a rating question from (0-100) 0 being worst. NOTES: Commodore should place emphasis on the lower value areas to prevent them from switching computers. 6) City dealers: This tells the number of Amiga Computer sellers in a users' vicinity. The more dealers in a city, the more the area uses Amiga computers! NOTES: Notice how large parts of Europe are (Denmark, Ireland, and England) It's no wonder why the Amiga is more popular in Europe than in the US. 7) Dealer Distance: This map shows how far away the average closest amiga dealer is to the users. The larger the distance, the less likely other people in his area will buy Amigas. NOTES: the US has a very large distance between dealers (>20 miles) In order to compensate, Commodore needs to use more TV and magazine ads to cover the large distance. 8) Software purchases: This map shows which areas of the world buy more amiga software. A map like this would be very valuable for a starting software company...it's says market in the US and Australia first! As a side note, the plague of software piracy in Europe can be evidenced from the smaller numbers. 9) Amiga Programming Skills: It is known that the most complicated software are games and that Europe has a plethora of talented game writers. This map shows that the assumption is true: European people tend to know more about the technical aspects of the Amiga (or at least that's what they think :-) 10) Amiga Support: The last map is the most important. Without Amiga support, one is doomed to get rid of their Amiga-- they don't know what to do or what they can do with it. Support ranges from BBS's, to user groups, to developer conferences, to the local computer store. From the survey one notices that Scandanavia is quite deficient in support....yet if one looks back at my first two maps, one sees that Scandanavia has a quite large amiga user base! From this one can interpret that Commodore needs to get their act together in Scandanavia. It's user base is large and they are looking for help, but no one from the head office at Commodore wants to do anything (they just closed the Finnish office a few months ago to make things worse!) Overall I was impressed with the way the surveys came out. Most people gave legitimate results and they are intersted in what results I come up with. The only thing I am not happy with is what to do with the standard deviations... some of the categories had large variances while others didn't. How would I graphically represent such chaos (probably an overlayed pie chart or graph correct?) Commodore should find these results interesting.