Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors

[bhoggett]

I've been saying the same as Dave for about five years now, but most of the time people have just scoffed. I don't expect the reaction would be very different now.

I haven't touched an Amiga or an Amiga emulator of any sort for about two years now, and you know what? I don't miss it one bit.

It's a shame, but the neo-Amigas are no more than toys, as Dave says. That's OK because people can still have fun with toys, but they don't register when people consider real computing solutions.

[bhoggett]

It's not official support that makes the difference, it's developer support. None of the neo-Amiga platforms have adequate developer support, which is why they are no more than toys for geeks at the moment.

Fun toys for those with the money to burn, perhaps, but still toys.

I think the term "hobbyist" is a bit grand, really. "Cult" would be more appropriate.

Anyway, time to climb back into my box again.  :lol:

[bhoggett]

A3KOne wrote:
Geek toy? No.

Fanatic toy? Yes.

I was trying to be polite.  ;-)

[bhoggett]

Glaucus wrote:
Hi Bill! Long time no see. How are things?

  - Mike

Reasonably good. I've been away from all things Amiga for many months now - don't even have a posting account on ANN!  :lol:

Mind you, nowt's changed. I might have been away for no more than a week.

Get my point? No one is gonna invest big bucks into a computer that has almost zero utility. If you want to start off a new OS you'd best do so in such a way so that it's easy and cheap for people to buy into it. Ideally, OS4 would have been on PC hardware and software would have been given out for free or very little cost. The PC hardware would have been easy to do, the free release not so much. But still, even at a reasonable cost, AmigaOS4 could have been viable on standard hardware. That's my point

I think that's the point Dave was making too.It was a path that suited some of the existing user base, but one which excluded for ever any opportunity for growth. It's amazing that even five years later people keep vehemently denying it against all available evidence.

[bhoggett]

The Amiga is a drug, This thread is proof positive if it.  :lol:




If you want to read people ranting on ad-infinitum about things they know absolutely nothing about, read an Amiga forum. Nice to see some things never change.

[bhoggett]

We need to gentrify the community of these attitudes. This market has been beaten to within an inch of it's life already.

Good luck to ya. I think you're aiming for the impossible because the purveyors of these attitudes will go to their graves before they change their minds.

Just look at the justifications:

- It was the only reasonable thing to do given the resources...

So, given that you have so few if any resources you take the option which will bring least revenue, therefore guaranteeing that there will never be any resources to do anything else?

- OS4 is meant for embedded systems. It was designed from ground up for that purpose

Funny, that was never even remotely mentioned until Eyetech's plans bit the dust. So, an embedded platform with a completely unfamiliar API, requiring a completely new learning curve for developers, and also no Java capability? Seems a rather cavalier and reckless approach to me, specially for a company without the resources to fund the spread of their platform themselves.

- There would have been all these x86 trolls demanding to know why it didn't run on their machine...

Simply a matter of drivers. Supply a properly designed API and documentation and people will write drivers. AROS seems to work on a  lot of motherboards, though of course not all devices are supported. Amithlon worked on a lot of systems too, despite having problems with driver delivery. Just supply a compatibility list and the responsibility is with the user to adhere to it.

- People would be able to use Windows or Linux instead and they would choose that ahead of AmigaOS...

Ever heard of multi-boot? Of course people will use other platforms for what they can't do through AmigaOS. If the apps/games appear for AmigaOS, I'm sure most would use that; if not, then at least the user knows he won't be crippled. This is already the case to some extent with AmigaOnes - there are a series of things you can do as a Linux user for which there is no alternative under AmigaOS.The only difference is that they have to do it on expensive unreliable and increasingly unavailable hardware.

Hyperion don't seem to know what they are doing from a business point of view. To the outsider, they seem to shift their apparent aims to fit in with whatever can be passed off as most plausible at any given time, irrespective of whether they have the resources or expertise to service the market they are supposed to be targetting.

So, considering Hyperion's "business plan" is most likely vapourware, and the whole original premise of bringing growth back through PPC desktops is in tatters, what happens next?

Dave speaks a lot of sense, and has done so for years, but no one's listening. Now some - a minority - are starting to ask themselves: "Did we do the right thing? Were we really justified?". Well, it doesn't matter any more. As Mikey_C himself said on AWN: "the train has left the station", and those who made the wrong choice are left sitting on the platform. There are now only two choices left: ( a ) insist that it was the right choice regardless of the mounting evidence that would suggest otherwise, or ( b ) give up, move on and treasure the memories.

If there is a problem, it's too late to fix it.