Will Amiga ever live again?

[jonnyboy]

So, what has Amiga now got to offer? It's certainly not what it had in the early '90s, when it was a computer with untapped potential that struggled to get past being labelled as a gaming machine, with the exception of some niche markets (e.g. Lightwave being used in Babylon 5).
In 1992, the A1200 was technically way in front of your average PC in almost every way, apart from raw processor speed. Workbench 3.0 made Windows 3.1 look rubbish indeed - it could multi-task and manipulate data much better than the Microsoft counterpart.
By 1998, the rest of the world had caught up. Now, I wonder two things. What would have happened to Amiga if Commodore hadn't gone down the pan and instead marketed it well? And what future could Amiga feasibly have now?

[jonnyboy]

But once you'd bought your bog-standard A1200 it was still easy to upgrade. I think it was silly not to include even just a little bit of Fast RAM with the computer - it would have doubled its speed straight away.
Also, I think Amiga sound can almost hold its own nowadays: the standard Paula chip was still a standard feature, which PCs still don't enjoy nowadays.
I don't think HD floppies were that important at the time, and Commodore would have been wise to make Hard Disk versions more affordable more quickly - it was cheaper to buy a third-party one but you risked losing the rather good on-site warranty.
Given that 2D games were still far more popular than 3D ones in 1993, I think that AGA was better than VGA as well.

[jonnyboy]

I guess that would've been a better way to go with the A4000/030, which was a bit of an odd machine for a start. Although I guess to spend money on actually desigining a different case to the original A4000 would've been too much as well.
I think it was a good decision to stay with the A600's basic design (albeit correcting the silly ommision of the keypad!)
About it being mislabelled, I guess Commodore needed to provide something to which people related, but the "Desktop Dynamite" pack came out just too late. I bought the Comic Relief pack, which included just one game. Now all they needed to do was just bundle some other software instead, but I suppose the Comic Relief thing got them a plug on the BBC for free!
Maybe Commodore should've taken a little more trouble to make the AGA hardware a little better before releasing it. But I still say it was silly not to put any fastram at all in the machine. 512kb couldn't have cost too much by then.