I was gonna stop beating this dead horse, but that last comment jogged a memory.
Back in 1986, the Amiga was released and gave independant computer shops another choice in the emerging 16-bit PC comsumer space.
The franchise I worked for (Softwaire/Software Centre) elected to carry the machine and it's full line of release titles, which were mainly Ageis and EA titles, lots of one offs (Mark of the Unicorn's games come to mind, as does WordPerfect)
Anyway, as some of you know, the Amiga was initialy available with Kickstart and Workbench 1.1. I heard that Commodore made a big deal about letting developers know that 1.1 was not firm, and that you needed to code carefuly and follow the rules, becuse some of the licence you could take in 1.1 would not be allowed in 1.2.
You can kind of see where this story is going... Developers held off on some big titles, waiting for 1.2 to come out. This made consumers antsy as they could see thier desired apps being churned out for such machines as the Atari ST. There was a perception that 1.1 was "not done" and the Amiga was "not ready". Worst of all, when 1.2 came out, many titles that ran on 1.1 were crashing! The headlines were similar to this "XP SP2 breaks Firewire 800!" headine. Minor stuff, ealisy remedied, but big-time fodder for Commodores's enemies. The upshot of all this was the Amiga became known as the world's first Multicrashing computer. An obvious jibe coming from Amiga rivals and enviers. (Reminds me of the guys saying "M$ Windoze" at every opportunity.)
Worse still, developers publicly BLAMED Commodore for breaking their apps!! But Commodore had warned that what to do and what not to do!
Worse still - many, many chains and franchises scaled back or pulled out of Amiga altogether. They either never got back, or got back in sparingly when thay saw that the 500 was more stable and an easier sell. But remember - those first retailers got burned big with unsold inventory labled "Requires Kickstart/Workbench 1.1" on the front. There was no "price protection" or anything for software in those days.
I really think the Amiga was doomed to fail from 1986 onward, as a result of the rough start that let Atari take off running, and gave other manufacturers the needed time to mount a defense (Apple IIGS) against Amiga's superior design.
To tie this all together, I have little doubt that LaCie's firewire needed a BIOS upgrade to work as full speed with WinXP. Whose fault is that? MS? LaCie? Firewire chipset makers? Don't care. But threads like this take me back to Winter 1986, when the boss made the decision to cut Amiga, based on the "Multicrashing" allegations, and the advice of fellow retailers. Back then, I wished I coudld have educated him that C= wasn't really to blame, but were fixing things at light-speed just the same. Problem was, he caved into peer pressure from those who said "Don't bother sticking up for Amiga. It makes you out to be a fanatic!" When people badmouth it, just nod and move on!
