Amiga Acknowledges T-shirts Shipping

[KennyR]

Wayne wrote:
They (Genesi) subsidized boards specifically to undercut then steal Amiga Inc's potential customers who -- even then -- were fed up and waiting for OS4.

It wasn't subsidy, it was the failure of the Pegasos-1. After the abandoning of the first Pegasos line, attempts were made to make the best of a bad thing by using these boards to woo developers. First they were sold at lower prices (299 dollars instead of the original 499). Then they were simply given away for free. This helped the community (yes, the WHOLE community!) both by increasing the number of developers, and preventing their "leakage" to other platforms.

Regardless of what Buck was thinking or his dislike for Ewen, OS4 lost those users "fair and square" because of expensive hardware, Amiga Inc. scandals and an OS long behind schedule; while Genesi gained them by throwing free hardware at developers, developer support sites and having visually better setup. It wasn't because of some evil subterfuge designed to destroy Amiga Inc. AInc simply did not support the community and is not in a position to claim they were somehow conspired against by someone who did.

[KennyR]

And another thing. A hypothetical situation: supposing Genesi, bPlan and MorphOS never existed, and Eyetech and Hyperion didn't have any serious PPC competition from 2001 to present day.

Would that have prevented XE and SE users having to keep their boards in a cupboard years after purchase? Would it have prevented thousands of people holding back on buying them waiting for the price to drop a bit, or because OS4 was not ready? Would it have meant news of pretty serious bugs in A1 hardware wouldn't put anyone off? Would it have prevented there being a large number of people so distrustful of Amiga Inc after Bill McEwens blatant "mistruths" so they weren't interested in *anything* they ever did again? Would it have produced Eyetech's production capacity?

The answer to all these is no. It wouldn't have changed a damn thing.

If MorphOS had never existed, personally, like thousands of others, I'd either have prolonged buying an AmigaONE indefinitely after not getting my voucher (and watching the original Escena A1 plan quietly "disappear"), or got it and be sitting starkly disillusioned right now close on a grand out of pocket with a machine that did not work as I was told it would, with only a beta of OS4 for comfort. Probably the former.

Seriously, the blame for condition the community was in since Amiga Inc. took over cannot be placed on competition. Amiga Inc. dropped the ball, it's as simple as that. Eyetech and Hyperion both massively underestimated the scale of the task they picked up, and perhaps they'd never had to if Amiga Inc. hadn't abandoned the "classic" Amiga OS and left them with zero support.

Now its 2005, we're back where we were when Amino bought the Amiga IP: Genesi are not here (they're practically out of the picture), MorphOS is being developed in part time by unpaid coders, new A1 models are coming out. It's amazing, it's like 2001 again.

But KMOS/AInc haven't quite made up that trust deficit with the T-shirts, however much I appreciate them. It's much too easy to repeat the mistakes of the past. What I want to see now is the vouchers and Party Pack obligations being met. Once that's done, maybe we can look up to them as a real company again and start healing the rifts in the community. Until that, I can't trust them and I doubt many others will either.