@Matt_H
Sorry Matt, but I couldn't disagree with you more if I tried. Hang on, let me give it a shot... hnnnnnngh.
Nope, no good.
While your point about Amiga users becoming self reliant is certainly a valid one, I think Commodore's demise was the worst possible thing that's happened the Amiga. We became self-reliant out of neccessity and that's not always a good thing. We no longer had a central nervous system from which everything was controlled. A good thing? Not neccessarily.
With Commodore, at least, we had direction.
True, that direction was often confused and sometimes meandered aimlessly but ultimately, I believe, it was headed in the right direction. All hardware and software decisions were made by Commodore. This obviously tied us down as we were at the mercy of whatever the management decided to incorporate (or not) in any new models - but again, we were all rowing in the same direction. We may not have often agreed with that direction, but it was a unified move. We were all in the same boat.
The biggest problem with the Amiga since Commodore's demise has been the attempt to move the Amiga from custom hardware to non-custom hardware. The market has pulled itself in ten different directions without strong leadership. There's been a lot of duplication of effort, split energy and of course a huge amount of in-fighting with everyone threatening to sue everyone else. It's one big sorry mess.
While Commodore may have made some spectacularly bad decisions, I think they were the only hope that the Amiga had of making this difficult transition from closed to open hardware. Whatever the future for the Amiga might have been, I think they were best candidates to take it forward to that future.
Looking back at magazines from 1994, it's interesting to see how many people whooped for joy at Commodore's fall. The future of the Amiga would be brighter without them, they predicted, and the machine would gain in strength from the "community".
Instead we've had various vultures circling the machine picking off the parts it wants while the rest of us bicker about Amiga One cases and whether or not OS 4.0 will be out in time for Christmas.
Per-leese.
