Optimism and the Amiga Community

[bhoggett]

Optimism ian't a problem as long as it's tempered with realism. What has IMHO hurt the Amiga scene in recent years has been an almost fanatical adherence to dogma and idealism while throwing any realism to the wind.

Following certain decisions taken back in 2001, the current situation was practically inevitable - a lot of people could see it coming but were shouted down.

Now it's too late to fix the problem, even if there was enough will to do so - and there isn't. Maybe that's pessimistic, but it also happens to be the cold harsh truth. Sure, maybe some guys with a soldering iron and a spare room to work in will produce some new hardware and maybe they won't but either way it won't reinvigorate the platform. The best they can do is persuade the few hundred people still in the market to cough up again - you're not looking at a concern that will be able to stay in business for more than two or three years. It's a sticky plaster over an open wound that won't heal, that's all.

It's a shame, but I think the die was cast years ago.

[bhoggett]

Just to add that my earlier assessment does not include the minimig project. IMHO that belongs in the retro scene and as such has nothing to do with revitalising the Amiga as a platform, even if it may well find a successful niche for itself. This also means it is not a target for the criticisms I expressed earlier.

AROS is the software equivalent of the soldering iron produced hardware project. It won't revitalise the Amiga as a platform simply because its developers are not interested in establishing - never mind expanding - a user base. The only criticism I have of AROS is that it is often presented as an alternative to AmigaOS4 and MorphOS - indeed some make it out to be the only future for Amiga-like operating systems - when the truth is that it is no such thing.

[bhoggett]

jarrody2k wrote:
Does Amiga need to exist as a new desktop to live on?

That depends on how you define "live on". Is UAE sufficient for the Amiga to live on? Probably. Is it enough for the Amiga to be revitalised? Obviously not.

AmigaOS was great for its time.  Perhaps to this day would still be considered very agile and still relevant to the modern desktop.  But as with BeOS we really don't have the resources to compete with Windows (or the more mature Linux solutions) in terms of being a viable and supported desktop alternative.

True, but I don't think competition with the big boys - in ANY market - is an option.

Minimig may not be an improvement on software, and mainly an efficiency improvement in terms of hardware, but it is a cheap way that Amiga can be deployed in all sorts of gadgets for the modern world.  I'm no electrical engineer, but such a product could have a low cost of manufacture, a tiny footprint and much less potential for component failure than a full-blown modern PC?

I've never understodd this apparent belief that the embedded market (particularly kiosks and similar stuff) is a problem just begging for a solution.

It isn't. It's a more dynamic market and is expanding more than the desktop, which means there are comparatively more opportunities, but at the same time it is a cutthroat market with some very experienced well funded players who already have product in place.

Sure, people can try to squeeze in Amiga solutions in there, but my estimate of the chances for success would be significantly less than 1%.

Cheap genlock/kiosk displays and a hand-held gaming device are two potent and viable (?) things that could result from the work of minimig.  People can think of more?

Gaming devices already exist, though of course a minimig might be able to fill a niche for a handheld Amiga - but again this won't offer the market opportunities of other handhelds because no one is going to write new 'Classic' Amiga games.

Kiosk displays... any savings on hardware would be eaten up in software development costs. Migration costs to and from an Amiga based system would be huge too. It really doesn't make a great deal of sense.

I guess my biting question is this:  What makes the 'retro' Minimig less of a continuance of Amiga than AmigaOS/Pegasos?

How long is a piece of string? The short answer is simple: it has virtually no potential for creating a market for new software. Then again, AmigaOS4 and MorphOS are in similar positions due to the decisions I mentioned earlier in the thread.

I'm not sure your question is specific enough to be answered. It can only be commented upon.

[bhoggett]

jarrody2k wrote:
So I guess from your point of view, the Amiga dies with its software development?

No, the Amiga will always live on as a retro platform, just like the ZX Spectrum or the C64.

But in my view the one and most important factor outside the retro scene is the userbase. Think of it as a species of animal, and what happens in nature: there are two crucial population points - one high, where the population level is so high it can no longer be supported by the food available and so will start to drop, and the other low, where the population is so low it cannot reproduce fast enough to balance out the natural death rate, even if food is plentiful. The latter leads to extinction.

The same with a userbase. If you can build a userbase that's big enough to motivate sufficient development (be it commercial or open source), you have a thriving or at least active platform. If your userbase has dropped so low that it simply doesn't generate enough development, the platform won't have enough about it to attract new users so you're on the slippery slope to nowhere.

This is what happened with the Amiga scene several years ago. The opportunity was there to focus on making sure the userbase that existed then, poor though it was compared to the good old days, would not diminish further - and maybe the trend could have even been reversed slowly. Instead, the focus was put on the short term interests of a few companies and individuals, at the cost of losing even more users and fragmenting what little was left into even smaller distinct platforms. The result is that all of the different platforms have dropped below the survival threshold and no longer have a rescue path.

AROS is slightly different in that it was not really part of the above scenario, but it too cannot balance the userbase/developer equation. At the moment AROS is only used by its developers, and because the developers don't acknowledge the needs of potential ordinary users, this is unlikely to ever change - in turn resulting in the fact that the developer base cannot increase to make more software available for it, which in turn would attract users. Catch 22.

[bhoggett]

jarrody2k wrote:
A survey would be something ideal for the AROS website.  Some quantative results on the make-up of the AROS community would be useful.

In fact I think this would be a very good idea. A survey to see how many regular AROS users there are, how many of them are developers, what those who are not developers use AROS for, and perhaps also a survey to see what would make the 10-minuters* become actual users.

I think the results would be quite enlightening. I think AROS is probably the only OS which supports more architectures than it has users. :-D


* - the people who try AROS for 10 minutes, then find it doesn't do much and put it away for several months before they repeat the process