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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: hishamk on March 06, 2015, 08:56:20 AM
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Of all the big players out there today, EA was the one that supported the Amiga (Deluxe Paint, Deluxe Video, etc).
I'm just wondering what would be the reason that the likes of Adobe and Wolfram Research not supporting Amiga? Especially in the early years when it clearly had a big technical and price advantage. Was it, as usual, Commodore's fault for not pushing for, striking deals, etc?
Wouldn't a color Photoshop version for Amiga would have been a no brainer? And as for Mathematica, I'd think Stephen Wolfram would've been impressed by how the Amiga could visualize concepts (the alternative Waterloo Maple was released for Amiga).
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Of all the big players out there today, EA was the one that supported the Amiga (Deluxe Paint, Deluxe Video, etc).
I'm just wondering what would be the reason that the likes of Adobe and Wolfram Research not supporting Amiga? Especially in the early years when it clearly had a big technical and price advantage. Was it, as usual, Commodore's fault for not pushing for, striking deals, etc?
Wouldn't a color Photoshop version for Amiga would have been a no brainer? And as for Mathematica, I'd think Stephen Wolfram would've been impressed by how the Amiga could visualize concepts (the alternative Waterloo Maple was released for Amiga).
This was the problem every amiga user did have from 1986 to 1993 we did see amazing software package was realsed on other computers mac, pc, etc. And this was also the reason why many had to get a pc or mac to run programs like adobe programs or a web browser.
So the reason for this..... yes it was commodore that did not have the funds to support developers to make quality software so we was left with "look a like" programs.
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I think a big part of the problem was the Amiga market, people like to know what market the computer platform was aiming for.
For PC it was clearly Business first, Education next and then only years later did it start to focus on the more media, home and gaming markets.
Mac was the same it was clearly aimed at the media market first, (publishing, artist, music etc) then Education, Business, and home markets.
Amiga I dont think had a real market in mind to go after at first and and you could argue, home / gaming market was (and should of been) it main focus to replace the popular C64. and in Europe they kinda of got it right, and the rest can come later, in the end the best market for Amiga to be in was media competing ageist Mac and some areas like TV support for early basic CGI and TV overlays it won, but as we know it could of been so much more if they had focus more.
And so software houses are going to focus on which platform is the most popular for each of its market, that why windows got loads of business software and became no1 in that area, Mac got used a lot in newspapers / magazine so got great software to deal with the problems they faced and became no1 in that field. Amiga did'nt quite become no1 in any filed, although I think it was used a lot to make the 16bit games on and thats why we got good software in that area.
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Amiga was the choice for TV/video use briefly. But the professional market was much smaller in the pre-digital/internet video era. Mac dominated in desktop publishing thanks to it's simplicity of use and the built in monochrome display at 512x342 gave a crisp image for wysiwyg applications. The association of Commodore and the Amiga with games and home use made it a harder sell in the business market where it was also competing with the PC and its IBM legacy.
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Amiga did not have enough market share to make it worthwhile. The Amiga may have had a very instrumental role in all our lives, but in the bigger scheme of things it was always a niche PC in terms of market share.
Was likely more PC's and Mac's sold in 1 year than there was in the entire run of the Amiga back in the early days.
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Mac was very niche, in some ways more niche than the Amiga, it was the DTP/Graphic Design industry that established it and kept it afloat when Apple was in as much trouble as Commodore in the mid-90s. There was no reason, early on, for Commodore to not have maximised the Amiga's impact upon the DTP/Graphic industry, it was very suited for it and as someone who worked in that field at the time I would tut a lot at the crap we'd have to put up with by using a Macintosh.
There were interface issues that definitely gave the Mac an advantage but if Adobe had supported the Amiga and brought Photoshop to it, along with its Type 1 font format I see no reason why A2000/3000s wouldn't have been a very common sight in Graphic Design/Publishing houses. Obviously, Quark ruled the page layout industry at the time so you'd need that, but, again, I think Quark would have sat great on an Amiga. Compare an A4000 price to that of a Quadra 950 at time of release, even with a gfx card upgrade, it still kills the Mac.
Steve Jobs was right to have been scared sh*tless by the Amiga, and rather than trying to take out the PC, Apple was what Commodore should have gone after and they would have literally ate them up.
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If Apple could be considered niche back then, not so bad being niche, I guess. Estimates for total number of Amiga's sold over the years is 4.8 million - Apple sold nearly 400,000 Mac's the first year they were out, and 1 million a few years later (1 millionth Mac was made March 1987).
A common argument I know I saw first hand over here in Canada was that Commodore was perceived as a low cost, "toy" type computer company, left over from the C64 days. Of course, that's a totally wrong perception when it comes to the Amiga. Over in Europe, the Amiga was a far bigger seller and player. North America was always a weird market for the Miggy.
Often curious how sales would have went for C= had they only focused on the lower end, considering the vast amount of Amiga sales were not on the "big box" Amiga's, but the wedge ones like the A500. That being said, I likely wouldn't have ever owned an Amiga at all if the big box systems were never made :) Never owned an A500, and didn't own an A1200 until 2009, I just didn't care for the wedge miggy's.
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Many factors went into Commodore missing these and other opportunities.
Geography
Amiga was pretty big in Europe and even here in Australia it enjoyed a healthy following and made its way into many businesses. But in Apple's home market, the US, Commodore did't spent enough marketing $ to get Amiga into schools, and into the creative business mindset.
Socio-economic
In the '80s Apple had a strong presence in elementary, middle, and high schools. And IBM had convinced many a business to buy an XT and an AT system. American businesses liked to use American business focused brands. Commodore was seen as the games PC maker, even though they also diversified their business into UNIX and IBM compatibles. Atari would have had some similar stigma.
Sales and Marketing
IBM was a giant and despite how much money they practically handed to Microsoft, they were not going to suffer if they made a mistake here and there. The Open Computer Platform accidentally invented by IBM made it difficult for all including Apple. Apple actually spent quite a bit on marketing but they too were floundering in the late '80s and early '90s, its financial troubles softened by extended Apple II contracts and DTP stalwarts like Quark.
Industry Trends
It's not so much that IBM won, it was the open computing platform of bare motherboards that can be populated by an assortment of daughter cards. Commodore Amiga, Apple, Sun, Silicon Graphics, and even NeXT were all still thinking of a completely custom and proprietary system and bus architecture. Some even used proprietary RAM. Apple failed a little bit less than Amiga to position their higher end M68k computers using the 030 and 040.
Business Management
IBM had made mistakes as well and continues to do so today, but when you are the No 1 computer company on the planet it is justified to refer to them as "too big to fail".
Who's not too big to fail? Digital/Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics (sgi), Atari, Commodore, Osborne, Wang, and even Apple who were at the brink of bankruptcy in the mid-'90s. Compaq was once rated #2 and Sun was rated #3. And if you consider the gaming hardware market then we also have Atari and SEGA.
By the end, Commodore had made too many bad calls and/or did not insulate itself enough with deals and legacy installations to make it through the continually changing ICT landscape. Not sure if having Adobe write software for the platform would have made all that much of a difference.
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I ran Photoshop 4, Quark, Illustrator, MS Office Netscape on my 68060 A4000 with CV64 on a 17 inch monitor under emulation. All cracked of course. Ran better than any Quadra and even some early PPC machines.
But I still preferred the quick and dirty workflow of Photogenics, ImageFx, ProPage, DPaint, Brilliance, and I used the Digita Office which met my needs and was faster. Most of it I got free off cover discs, 'cept Digita Office and Photogenics.
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Over in Europe, the Amiga was a far bigger seller and player.
In Europe the Amiga market was dominated by pirated games and demos.
The Macintosh II in 1987 with true color as standard should have been a wake up call for commodore.
For commodore to be successful they should have started AA immediately after the A1000 launch and it should have added support for chunky 256 colour and 16 bit true color and the OS needed to look better and crash less often.
By 1988 the Amiga was essentially a toy. There were some niche markets that it worked for, in the same way the PlayStation 3 was used in clusters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
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crash less often.
Is this amiga OS we are talking about. ?
The slickest OS ever made, and the smallest ever made.
Amiga oS crashing sounds strange since I did not have this problem before I got a pc.
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Is this amiga OS we are talking about. ?
Yes, Amiga 1000 shipped kickstart on disk because it was so buggy. Kickstart 1.2 was the first they dared make roms for and even that had the bug that prevented auto booting hard drives from working, which is essentially what Kickstart 1.3 was for.
Kickstart 2.04 was better but that was 5 years after the Amiga 1000 launch. They finally fixed the constant floppy disk corruption ready for everyone to buy hard drives.
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First of all, Quark was never viable on the Amiga, since it was entirely built upon Apple's Quickdraw library. When it was eventually ported to the PC, it was only possible through Quark making a QuickDraw emulation layer on Windows, and the ties to QuickDraw eventually made Quark lose foothold since it couldn't easily integrate features which weren't supported in QuickDraw.
As for Photoshop, a port to the Amiga didn't make much sense since the OCS display couldn't support the 256 colours and high resolution (640x480) necessary for useful image manipulation, and Commodore didn't support third-party graphics cards in the OS. So you can blame Commodore.
You can also blame Commodore for not doing like Atari and delivering a flicker-free high-res screen and a cheap laser printer. Atari had a sizeable share of the DTP market, especially in Germany, despite having an OS that made little children cry. If I was going to make a DTP package in 1987, I would also have chosen the Atari over the Amiga, simply because the price for an equivalent Amiga package would have been twice that of the Atari, given the extra expense of the flicker fixer, hard drive and laser printer.
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For commodore to be successful they should have ...
Oh, the things Commodore should have done. Don't get me started on that. I too like playing hindsight.
Though, the more I learn about how Commodore ran their business, I'm not sure an earlier release of AA with support for chunky graphics would have made a difference. It may have delayed things in some way, and maybe even AAA and Hombre would have seen the light of day.
I now see, thanks to my 20/20 hindsight, that Commodore would not have made it much past the mid '90s. It may not have gone bankrupt and liquidated, but it would have been acquired and then forgotten, like Palm.
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If I was going to make a DTP package in 1987, I would also have chosen the Atari over the Amiga, simply because the price for an equivalent Amiga package would have been twice that of the Atari, given the extra expense of the flicker fixer, hard drive and laser printer.
Yes. Times were different, people who had never used a computer before would buy one to run one piece of software.
The ST hardware was inferior in many ways but that mainly affected games. The built in midi, hard drive port & progressive high resolution video gave it a real boost in certain markets.
I was playing games and wasn't doing DTP or image manipulation, so I had an Amiga connected to an old TV set.
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In 1987, the Amiga 2000 which had a 68000, ocs chipset with 640x480x16 colors which was quite slow was competing with the Mac 2 which came with a 68020, could be expanded to 21mb ram and came with a gfx card capable of 256col/16bit palette and 512x384 and 640x480.
This isn't even comparable. By 1987 in terms of graphics and CPU power there was already something much better than the Amiga. Of course, it was twice the price of the a2000 but you get something much better for serious work.
The 68020 was quickly replaced with a 68030+68882. And in 1989 the IICi was released with onboard video. Memory could be extended to 128mo ram with onboard Sim slots. You could drive three simultaneous monitors with 3 graphic cards.
In 1990 the Amiga 3000 came with basically the same graphics capabilities: 16 colors max in high resolutions, 12bit palette (that's 5 years after the a1000), and a 68030+68882 and ability to expand memory to up to 16mb.
The Amiga also sold only a few millions of units in its entire lifetime, most of which were simple A500 with no harddrive.
And then Photoshop was released..
So: why do you think Adobe didn't bother making an Amiga version of Photoshop?
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Some of the Apple history books mention Adobe since the two companies were very close when the Mac was developed. Been a while since I read them but I Would not doubt there was support direct from Apple to try to keep them like this and money or hardware that got them to develop for Mac in the first place considering PCs were far outstripping Mac, and early Macs were hardly capable machines even for their niche market. Apple also licensed Postscript from Adobe for the main printer for the Mac in DTP, the laserwriter. This meant money to Adobe who had all their major software on Mac since it helped to sell fonts to Mac users.
Adobe made a lot on selling fonts back then. You bought Photoshop once, for instance, but you would have to buy Adobe fonts for each of your DTP stations everytime you wanted new typefaces.
Then Apple decided to go to Microsoft who had a clone of Postscript called TrueType and license that as an alternate font system for the Mac. As most clones go, the fonts were cheaper and it was already in use in Windows meaning lots of fonts and printer support was alreayd available.
So once Apple fired this 'shot' at their partner, Adobe decided to fire back. Knowing their software was what was making the Mac de-facto for DTP and graphics art they ported the golden eggs to Microsoft's platform. At this time, of course, Windows had a much larger market than Amiga and made the more logical choice as a way to slap Apple's hands and in 1992 brought Photoshop over to Windows and Illustrator in 1997. They also ignored Apples advances in the OS, refusing to use things like Quickdraw which ensured those parts of the OS would never become mainstream.
So, if Commodore (who never released a laser printer like Apple did, since DTP was not their focus for Amiga) had courted Adobe at the beginning things might have been different.
If Apple had screwed over Adobe sooner before it was clear Commodore like Mac was steadily losing ground to Microsoft things also might have been different and Adobe might have ported their software over to Amiga instead being a more capable machine, or even the ST.
So this would be a reason that makes logical sense for the lack of Adobe on Amiga
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First of all, Quark was never viable on the Amiga,
Although I'll not say you are not correct in the fact that Quark maybe made the mistake of not advancing their software, or basing it too heavily on one technology tied to an OS, the main reason why Quark lost out on the Page Layout market is due to the Adobe's decision to release Creative Suite, after that it was all over because you basically got InDesign for free, which negated all risk for publishers/designers to give it a try as Photoshop/Illustrator/Acrobat were basically de facto anyway. And this was when InDesign was only really just pulling ahead feature/usability wise from Quark, but it was enough to pretty much convince everyone to switch.
But going away from that for a minute, early on, Quark would have worked on an A2000 no problem, in '92-'94 there was a ton of magazines etc.. being laid out on monochrome/grayscale screened Macs. And having seen Pagestream 3, I found that to be quite similar in feel, albeit minus the Mac interface differences.
Add to the fact that due to the graphics market was the main provider of sales it naturally drove the hardware to tailor itself to it. In '86-89 I don't think a lot of what we take for granted as given qualities for the Mac platform for graphics was as locked down or inevitably to follow as may be suggested when looking at historical timelines. What I said was that Commodore should have gone after that segment of the market, which would have entailed responding to it accordingly. The point made above about Shapeshifter literally out performing Mac's on equivalent or lesser hardware only confirms that it was very possible. Even my lowly AGA A1200 030 back in the day ran Shapeshifter pretty nicely, certainly usable, not for high end stuff photo manipulation of course, but then the equivalent Mac wouldn't have been chosen either, but many design/layout projects could be undertaken quite satisfactorily.
It's not always about the high-end, yes it's great bragging rights, but you get the usability sorted along with a good price/performance ratio, then if you can get critical mass, you're in. Amiga was in many ways most of what the Mac promised to deliver but failed for many years.
In some ways, all Commodore would have needed to do was to show you could continue working while copying files from a Syquest drive, the amount of time wasted up till OS X, OS 9 was terrible in that aspect, and when time/deadlines = money, it makes a pretty convincing argument. That is, if it had been made in the first place of course.
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Some one hit on the real problem, which was power. The Amiga just didn't have enough for far to long. The 68000 cpu was a great chip, but just wasn't powerful enough.
That why Word Perfect quite development on the Amiga. Their V5 needed way more power than the 68K could offer. WP needed at least a 68030 to run. While there there were accelerators with this chip, there was no Amiga model with it. The Amiga 3000 was just to late in coming.
While there may have been other reasons, this was surely the main one.