What will drive the New Amiga?

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A Review So Far!

For those who are lost a quick, and not complete, review of what has been said so far.

The question seems to be can the Amiga survive in as just a niche product?  There has been discussion about where that niche might be

Most suggest a Set Top Box, stylish well costructed and small enough to be carted round to your friends for a quick plug into their TV.  It will also act as a 'Media Centre' allowing DVD,MP3,internet accesss,TV, etc. Essentially a media convergence box, with a solid S/W front end that loads fast and allows more access behind the GUI when wanted.

Others say this has been tried before, and TV resolutions are too low to even view a web page properly.  Hardware is only a secondary concern away why not spend more effort establishing some killer apps that will make more people want to use our O/S before/or instead of buying new Hardware.

Price (unfortunetaly) is the key to most purchasing decisions made by "Average Joe".  Unless enough geeks/fanatics/early-adopters can be found to buy and produce stuff for this new machine it will never reach mass-market appeal.  And entering into the mass-market is the only way I see of getting prices to a point our Joe will buy at.  Horrible circlar arguement...

Is there a way out?  Or should we all just jump over board now...

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A review continued!

...not yet, there's more.

What's wrong with being a niche market (apart from it being fairly expensive), some say the glory days of old will never come back, and if we keep trying to reclaim those heights and keep comparing ourselves to Microsoft we will never get anywhere!  You have to start small and build up that user base again, get support behind you and money will follow.

The problem is that will the number of people who fondly remember Amigas still want to buy one be enough to keep the system moving till the "average Joe" consumer who (for the sake of arguement) has never heard of Amiga before will want to buy one.

Amiga users never where simply buying into hardware or software but the perfect synagy of both.  The great games would not be possible without the hardware, and in turn efficient software meant less powerfull CPUs can be used.  A third tier, the Amiga Community, grew up during the hard times of '95 onwards.  All three making the Amiga strong enough to last untill now (lets not give up before we see the fruits of these new projects)

The problem is the community has been fractured by bad PR, non-action and some might say action in completely the wrong direction.  AROS is the perfect example of a community trying it's best to keep Amiga alive, but it is small, and working towards something that others definately don't want, AO/S on x86!  (Reasons for and against talked about elsewhere. Manytimes!)

Now with MorphO/S on one side and AmigaO/S4 on the other the community has become even more split.  Getting the community spirt back is very important to keep Amiga alive.  A unified developers web site was suggested to keep the S/W side going all working together with elected team managers keeping individual projects on track. (Although IMHO the idea of Amiga credits might not work so well after burnt fingers with other pre-pay and membership schemes in the past.)  Still I think it's a good idea, and would offer my services in design and documentation, (programming not quite upto scratch, unless anyone wants some Fortran90 work doing!)

In conclusion I think there is still a chance for Amiga if the community can all work together.  The civil and detailled discussions here show it is possible.  Keep it up Amiga.org, our community needs us!