I don't completely buy that M$ would even give a rat's patoot about GW's owning the Amiga at the time, especially since they were a distant fourth or lower in the PC vendor world, probably lower. If IBM or Dell, Compaq or otherwise had it, I could see M$ taking more notice. But IBM had already squandered OS/2, Compaq effectively thrown away the Alpha CPU, Tru64 Unix and whatever else they bought from the remants of DEC (does anyone know really why they bought DEC in the first place?) and HP still couldn't decide if they wanted to be a printer company, PC company or high-end Unix server company. Kind of like Motorola putting out great CPUs but always 'later' than Intel/AMD, thus x86 ate their lunch too, and Motorola building all sorts of other stuff intel never did, distracting them from a CPU-focus.
M$ has focus and the most powerful marketing/FUD department in the business (we already know they don't have the best software
. intel even cowers in many ways to them, how would (comparatively) little Gateway have had any leverage?
While surely the Amiga wouldn't have been the core business for Gateway, they might have made some good money by simple PPC updates for killer apps like the Toaster, etc. and had a nice little side business - the success of Linux is proof that others are still waiting for a better way than Windoze, the Amiga might have been a small part of that.. .
kevin orme
amiga university
www.amigau.com
