NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/comp/sys/amiga/misc/19399

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-05 | 7.6 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: No, it ain't dead yet
Date: 5 Jan 1993 02:16:19 GMT
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In article <[e-mail]> (Robert L. Thomas) writes:
>Bleh.  I have had an amiga back when Mac's were little grey boxes and
>the IBM AT was the best they had to offer.

Me too.

>This was amigas chance to rule but lets face it, the amiga is in a
>tail spin.

Not exactly, its more like they aren't very focused, or their focused
somewhere you aren't looking.

> ... I have played wing commander on a 486 and I have to laugh at the
> amiga version.

So did you play a version of wing commander written for an '040 based
Amiga?

> ... I'm going to miss my amiga, but when I can get a full 386 SYSTEM
> for $1000, and a 486 for $2000 (note that monitor mem
> HD etc) I am going to have to go shopping at electech rather then
> take a long trip to the only amiga dealer of merit in my area.

Hello everyone, no I'm not dead, thanks for asking. It had to do with
having kids and suddenly losing all of my "free" time and hence my hacking
time. Their getting older, and I'm learning to cope so I'm at least reading
the amiga groups again.

Robert raises some valid points, and the underlying mechanisms that cause
them to be true need to be examined.
    1)    A lot of companies owe their life to the existence of the
    existence of the 80x86 market, and they work at protecting
    it. Intel and Microsoft are the most proactive.
    2)    x86 boxes are a "commodity" product. That means that anyone
    can design a motherboard and start selling "PC compatibles"
    with not a lot of overhead, and no investment in software.

The commodityness of the market means that for any of the clone makers
to maintain market share they have to do one of two things, sell it for
less or sell it with better features. Since "features" tend to be
incompatible no one bothers with that and the "sell it for less" strategy
takes hold. This is literally killing companies. Certainly the bottom
line at Compaq has taken a brutal blow, Everex is under chapter 11 protection,
and places like Mylex and ATI are hemmoraging red ink. Now, more than
ever, buying a clone is a gamble whether or not the company will survive.

For you and me of course this is a boon, but it can't go on. '93 may be
the year the PC died for several reasons.
    1) Clone makers haven't invested in the design tools neccessary
       to build Pentium machines.
    2) There is no "profit" in building PC compatibles, hence no R&D
       budgets.
    3) There are three, possibly four OSes that are competeing for
       "First real OS to run on the machine." (Win/NT, OS/2, Univel,
       Solaris) None of the developers know where to jump.
    4) The machines literally *creak* with a filesystem that rolls
       over dead on big disks, lack of true multitasking, legacy
       applications (Who wants to tell a Fortune 100 company that
       they can't use their custom program that used to work on a
       IBM PC/XT any more?)
    5) No serious bandwidth or standards for multimedia.
Its strange but the PC world is where the CP/M world was back in '81 when
the IBM PC was introduced. No doubt the organism it too large to die any
sort of sudden death, but in many ways that death is already foretold.

The other strange thing is that what the behemoth has done, is to actually
create a computer market for the "home." "How?" might you ask. Quite simply
the "cheapness" of the IBM PC has lead to a *lot* of them finding their way
into homes. That in turn makes people ask "Gee, so what can I do with it?"
And in pursuit of that question the open market has come to bear. Now the
really strange thing, is that while this relatively new market is beginning
to bloom, *PC and Mac folks are ignoring it!* You see, they too were mislead
into believing "a PC in every home" once, before there was any sort of
infrastructure to support it, and got burned. So now they are shy. Good for
us! Things like Quiken, Managing your Money, etc have actually generated
demand for better electronic banking in this country (US). Things like
Checkfree have made that possible. Charles Schwab sells a program that lets
you buy and sell stocks using your PC. The desire for data has lead the
development of CD-ROMs. As we reach the cusp of penetration for CD-ROMs
the demand will grow astronomically. Ever wonder what it would be like to
get "Consumer Reports" for the last 5 years on CD-ROM ? Its happening because
a) People have machines at home, b) They are desparately trying to use them
for something, and c) there is money to be made. The next couple of years
will no doubt _completely_ change the personal computer market, and the
Amiga is well positioned to capture a decent chunk of what is suppoesed to
become a 60 BILLION dollar business by 1998. (Source IDC)

So now we get back to the question of "focus." Commodore has done well
focusing on the video segment of the market. They have achieved good
press and mindshare in that community. Nintendo, Sega, and the rest
are now touting "16 bit" systems as the greatest things since sliced
bread. Commodore got the 64 market by telling people "Why buy a video
game when for a bit more money you can get a video game *and* a computer."
This works with the Nintendo crowd. Commodore needs to do some focusing
here. Also if you target the Nintendites you have a much better shot
at getting around mom and dad.

At some point everyone asks. Ok, so I've got this thing and I want to use
it at home, what can I do with it. Certainly Commodore would be well served
by creating a set of "open" applications based on IFF, AREXX, etc that
did the standard stuff "flat file database, word processing, spreadsheets,
CD-ROM browsing, telecommunications, and faxing." But they have only limited
resources. But here again, the nice thing about the PC's "commodity" market
status is that the Amiga represents a "niche" that can earn a PC company
a bit of extra cache. And fortunatly the development tools are finally up
to a level where they can do so without totally falling over dead :-).

I'm rambling and this is too long already but I'll add this personal
testamonial. When I got some free time back and decided to pursue some
of my more estoric hobbies such as robotics, I thought "hmm, better go
out and buy a PC." But since I also like to write code and such I knew
I'd have to learn a new O/S and a new way of doing things. What I learned
was that Windows 3.x was about as friendly to the programmer as hex
dumps. No integration, no consistent models, no end to all of the special
case bullshit needed to run on "all" platforms. No fun at all to program
to (but very profitable, hence the large quantities of programs) So for
me my trusty A2000 with its serial ports and large memory space, and
true multitasking were the only way to go. It isn't a "state of the art"
game machine (the A4000 just might be, personally I'd like to see something
designed around the SparcStation 10 mother board :-) but it was certainly
a useful machine. Since I don't need the slots in an AT I think a bridgeboard
can get me the Apps I want (some cross compilers, prom burners etc.) but
is not as clear cut as it once was.


--
--Chuck McManis                Mr. NIS+                Sunsoft
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: <none>   Internet: [e-mail]
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.