I just wish people could stop trying to compare Amigas to PCs or other platforms. There's no comparison because their intended functions are completely different.
The "IBM PC Compatable" computers have always been designed for general business use. Walk into a cube farm today, or in 1994, you'll see a PC. A Mac perhaps if you go into the publishing department.
Where do you find the Amiga? TV stations (many still use them today for titling). Graphics studios (Took SGI workstations to pry Amigas out of the hands of the folks at Foundation Imaging, and most of them took their Amigas home). And of course, the home gamers, who loved the superior graphics capabilities and ease of use.
Amigas are graphics workstations. Always have been. Specialized machines designed for a specific task. Great games came as a result of the graphics cababilities. Trying to turn Amiga into a general business machine is rediculous at best, and doomed to failure.
If someone were actually serious about bringing the Amiga back from the shadows, they'd be sitting down with AMD and nVidia and designing a new kick-ass graphics workstation... Not x86 based, but the best RISC CPU AMD can dream up... Combined with the best chipset and GPU nVidia can crank out. Keep the simplicity of the OS, designed specifically for the architectural design. As it was before.
In other words, don't compete with Microsoft and Apple... Compete with SGI and SUN. Wow Animators and movie studios. The games will take care of themselves. Applications will of course follow suit as they always do.
Haynie is getting his wish already... AROS. It's success will be in combining the simplicity of AmigaOS with the cheapness of x86 hardware.
Perhaps this is blasphemy, but I believe the PPC is dying. Apple's announcement has essentially signed its death warrant. It's doomed to the same fate as the DEC Aplha Generation processors. Cost is determined by production, which is determined by demand. PPC costs will soar to unreasonable heights, making it useless for anything other than embeded systems... Which is not what Amiga is about (that's what BeOS and QNX are for).
Haynie is almost right... Amiga's future lies in the past. Follow the original model that succeded, and you will find success once again. But x86 is not the way (tho with enough support, AROS can beat Linux here).
