In continuation to my analysis of whether the takeover was (will be?) beneficial to the Amiga and its users, I shall examine the marketing strengths and weaknesses of the above three companies. This is difficult due to different time periods, that Escom were only involved for a year, and that Viscorp haven't actually bought Amiga Technologies yet...
Commodore's marketing of low end (ie, below £500) machines was generally excellent, especially since the A500. Macintoshes and PCs were never priced this low, so the only competition was from the Atari ST/Falcon and the Archimedes, which Commodore seemed to keep at bay with regards to sales. Escom could have continued this with a new, more powerful low end machine, but their high prices on old machines produced dangerous competition from 'outdated' cheap 486 PCs.
One area Commodore were not so good in was with machines above that price. In professional markets, the Amiga has succeeded in areas such as video,3D graphics and multimedia, but this is possibly more down to manufacturers of 3rd party hardware than Commodore (in particular, NewTek with Lightwave and the Video Toaster hardware, and Scala with InfoChannel). Escom's plans to license the Amiga would have encouraged such 3rd party companies, as they would be able to use the chips/operating system in stand-alone hardware devices. Viscorp, as already stated, intend to use the Amiga technology for their interactive TV 'ED' product, but only time will tell how successful it turns out to be. Viscorp say that they will also be licensing the Amiga technology, and as a result one company (Phase 5) is already developing high end Amiga clones.
In the main section on this project, I mentioned about future development. In the computer industry, there is only a certain number of times you can redesign a particular CPU to make it faster, yet retaining compatibility. Eventually, there comes a time when a new range of CPUs must be developed, based on radically new technology, where there is little compatibility with the older CPUs (without emulation).
Amigas, like Macintoshes and other computers, use the 68000 series range of CPUs from Motorola; although the last of these is still very fast, Motorola have abandoned the range, to produce the PowerPC range. Apple chose to use these for their new (now standard) PowerMac machines.
Before the takeover Commodore also expressed an interest to move to a new CPU range, but they had Hewlett Packard's PA-RISC chip in mind, instead. Now, however, Escom have chosen the PowerPC for the new range of PowerAmigas instead, and it is likely that Viscorp will continue this development. There will be many advantages in different platforms sharing the same CPU range; in fact, in a few years, in may be possible to buy a generic 'PowerPC computer', and then purchase additional operating systems. As well as the Mac operating system, various others are available (including Unix), and Sega are now developing a PowerPC console. Bearing all this in mind, perhaps it is better that the Amiga operating system is ported to the PowerPC, rather than the PA-RISC.
In actual fact, there is more to this. The new Amigas that Commodore intended to release were to be running Windows NT, and not the Amiga operating system, unlike Escom's plans. What is the point of producing just another Windows NT clone - it would no longer be much of an Amiga without its operating system, surely?
Finally, returning to Viscorp; their plans at the moment are vague, but they seem insistant that the will license the Amiga technology. One point of interest is that they may not produce Amiga computers themselves - this could be a bad point, but it must be remembered that if they were producing them themselves, they would be reluctant to give out licenses, as such companies would take a cut from their market, and create competition. On the other hand, if Viscorp do not produce Amigas, there will be fewer problems with licensing, as more competion would mean better products at lower prices, increasing sales, and creating more return in licensing fees for Viscorp.
