I've stayed out of this until now...
I vote Sir Alan Sugar as the saviour...
No, he's not got a clue when it comes to technology - he can't evaluate what will or will not be successful and relies on people to tell him what will be successful. Those people let him down: look at the emailer phones that were supposed to make amstrad their millions.
Amstrad, to me, means cheap electronics that jump on the "me too" bandwagon with no innovation. The approach sounds almost Tramiel-esque: I want it cheaper, not better... Someone else can innovate, we'll take it mass market :-(
However, the guy does have business acumen and a personality which might be useful ;-) . If you could mix in a bit of Jay Miner's original flair and insight I think you'd be laughing.
What made the Amiga were the custom chips and DMA which at the time was revolutionary compared to the horribly crippled PC architecture. The 68000 chip probably helped too as compared to x86s of the day, it was beautifully simple to work with.
The appeal of decent graphics and sound was obvious, and took the Amiga into the home as a games machine, coupled with a useful OS. The games never caught me greatly, it was tinkering with the machine that I enjoyed.
Today, I think there's a market for a decent OS with the "given" that it'll support superb multimedia. The appeal is an easy to use, safe, secure OS that's understandable by one person with average interest in the field of computers.
Couple it with hardware that doesn't require huge cooling and you've made something appealing. Make it instant on/off, wrap up some decent games, internet access and office software and you're on to a winner providing you make it look appealing and inviting. It would be a "family computer" that could grow with the kids: as they progressed from games, they'd get into the other side of the machine. This is exactly what happened with me and the 64.
AmigaOS 3.x is already fragmenting too much in my opinion due to the stuff that's had to be bolted on. Look at the RTG stuff. Look at sound. Look at the network stacks. It's forked ;-) . The forking and choice is what I feel is truly preventing Linux from taking off. Which distro? Which desktop? Gnome or KDE? It's part of the power of the FOSS movement, but it's also a weakness.
The beauty of AOS 1,2 and 3 is that I know what every file in the OS does. It's understandable, it's straightforward, it's simple, it's beautiful! Even a base install of WinXP isn't. Linux or BSD distros can be close, but that's getting worse :-(
There's no particularly new insights in this post, admittedly, but the Amiga makes computing fun and understandable, and encourages hacking in the traditional sense of the word. I believe there's still a great appeal in that approach...
