Who else thinks this(...) is just like what AInc did?

[Jose]

Just food for though ok?
Taken from http://www.yellowtab.com/history.php

"...
The lack of sales forced Be, Inc. to the well-publicised focus shift, which led us to Be Inc.'s biggest and final mistake: the concentration on developing BeIA (Be [for] Internet Appliance). This announcement was extremely counterproductive as virtually all development of commercial software ceased at once. Furthermore, it made it impossible for Be, Inc. to pick up the BeOS pieces again, when the prophesied market for embedded systems turned out to be yet another analyst red herring!
 ..."

[JoannaK]

Nothing new there. I was active BeOS user at that time, and it felt real bad.  :-(

Personally, I think this is EXACTLY what they did, though I have to come to their defense and note that since it wasn't their money, I'm not certain that Bill McEwen had / has a lot of say in anything.

[Fats]

First I think that what Amiga did was similar but not the same. Be wanted to produce their own OS Amiga has the potential to run on all PDA OSes.
Secondly because one company fails in a certain segment does not mean that others have to fail also. A lot of linux companies are gone now but Red Hat is still going strong. But I agree that the embedded OS is tough world to live in but then a PC OS is even tougher.
Thirdly I don't have a PDA or cell phone so I really don't care that much.

A lot of linux companies are gone now but Red Hat is still going strong.

Red Hat is still going strong because they recognized IN THE BEGINNING the need for a very strong marketing and development push.  They were the first to get boxes on the shelves en masse.  

People LOVE the concept of a free OS, but people who use software WANT to see pretty boxes on shelves.  

In regards to Amiga, it's all rather a moot point anyway.  They (Amiga) aren't building an OS at all, out of anything.  Hyperion/Eyetech are kludging together a desktop system (rather slowly) based on updating very old technology (Hyperion) using readily available MAI motherboards (Eyetech) and Amiga is simply using TAO's stuff and writing a game player for other PDA's.

Not many PDA owners I know understand the logic of needing to buy a third party player to play Java games on their PDA.

[Madgun68]

@Wayne:

People LOVE the concept of a free OS, but people who use software WANT to see pretty boxes on shelves.

Unfortunately, it's not likely to happen any time soon. It's hard to get someone to pay for a piece of software when much of what they use didn't cost them a cent.

Not many PDA owners I know understand the logic of needing to buy a third party player to play Java games on their PDA.

I still can't figure out why they do that. The player should come free with the software that needs it to run.

I still can't figure out why they do that. The player should come free with the software that needs it to run.

That's just it.  It goes deeper than even that.  Free or not, most PDA owners that I talk to don't understand the need to install a third party player (yet more software on their space limited devices) to play games when games are already available for their PDA.  

People also do not want to have to remove their memory card or camera or other device in order to be able to play games.

I feel like Tom Hank's character in Big when he explains how he "just don't get it" in regards to the other toy exec's ideas.

[JoannaK]

Well.. I'm one of those 'thousands' of DE developers AmigaInc keep on bragging about..  and like the most of us have long time ago realized it's not worth the effort.

Idea of DE was not all bad, but they goofed it really  badly in practice. IF those players had been pre-installed on common systems it might have work and If they would have made more sensible deal for software disrtribution. Not to mention the fact that each release of Devkit (I have seen) is incompatible with all others (both binary & source level) it was  not good sign.