Discussing strategy of parties involved in the amiga-market (Hardware/OS)

[Boot_WB]

Maybe - just maybe - this can be a thread where things start to change for the better, where AmigaOS4 users can respect and be respected by the people who believe for whatever reason that AmigaOS 4 isn't for them.

OK, here goes:

a) The stated development direction of AmigaOS (Gallium, SM... er multicore support, etc) will require a huge amount of work, ie money, to accomplish.
b) The current strategy of producing custom hardware also requires huge amounts of money to accomplish.

To buy one of the top-end AmigaOS systems costs ~£2200 (iirc). Of this large investment, most of it is going into hardware development (paying back development costs for current generation, providing development funds for future ones). Only the AmigaOS license fee (amount unknown) goes to Hyperion for OS development, plus any further amounts that A-Eon chooses to invest seperately into Hyperion/3rd party development.

If A-Eon sells 500 boards at £2200, of that £1,100,000 spent by the community only around £50,000 (at £100 per OEM copy) goes to Hyperion for software development.

That's not enough to pay for Gallium, multiprocessing, etc.
It doesn't increase the user base.
It taxes out a lot of money from those Amigans willing to pay, but only diverts a small amount of it to developing the OS.

Of the £2200 spent, only a very small portion is invested into advance the OS - the rest is spent in hardware development costs.
Once the current generation of hardware is done, that 'investment' is without any value, and the whole spending cycle starts again.

I have all the respect in the world for Trevor and a great deal of sympathy (having been in a similar situation this year where the hard work offered voluntarily was met with suspicion, agression and constant hectoring), and support A-Eon's business aspirations for hardware development.

I just don't think Hyperion/AmigaOS have any realistic strategy to keep up without finding a way to further milk the community in advance of any of the promised advanced features. Not to mention failing to learn the lessons of the past wrt bull****ting about timescales and features.

Sadly, this seems to be quietly not mentioned when any new blood attracted to the X1000.

An example of this is the recent thread on Amigaworld.

A user asked "what is the current status of AOS4 SMP?"

I replied "It (AmigaOS 4.1 update 6 + Amiupdates to date) doesn't have any support for using multiple cores."

SSolie states that "That is incorrect"

wtf?

I reiterate my claim: If AmigaOS 4.2 is released before the end orf 2014 (including Gallium, OpenGL and SMP as stated for many years now) then I'll eat my socks (or possibly a suitably shaped and decorated fruitcake), acknowledge my error, wave a boing-ball flag, and post the vid on Youtube. Hell, I'll even post some dancing bananas.

If we can get people to respect each other's choices on this forum, more people will come back and maybe it'll stop being such a hostile place for people who happen to use AmigaOS 4.

+1

[Boot_WB]

@Boot_WB

Thank you. That's exactly the sort of thing we need. Healthy discussion - not bitter sniping and carping.

\o/ It is possible!
Choosing a suitable place helps a lot (ie not within a 'Good news' hardware announcement thread - I've made that mistake myself in the past, and it's understandable that criticism/discussion isn't kindly received at that point. It's the forum equivalent of the morose guy at someone's 40th Birthday party saying "It's all donwnhill from here..."

I completely understand what you mean about the price of the X1000, but I think you misunderstand the reason for its existence.

Yes, it exists to help AmigaOS develop by feeding it cash via sales, but that's not the real issue. The real issue is simply one of market forces.

There is a market for the X1000. This has been proven by its success, and the repeated production runs. That's what it's sold.
It also has the benefit that because it's a very powerful (for an Amiga) machine, productivity of users developing on it will go up slightly. Not a lot, but when you're recompiling MAME for the 10th time, believe me it helps!

And in that sense it's a complete success. I do take my hat off to Trevor for perservering through what sounds like an agonising set of hardware revisions with costs spiralling (hence the increased sales price and delayed release vs initial plans).

It's unfortunate that there's not more money from sales of the X1000 going into the OS4 development, but that wasn't really the purpose.

If its purpose was simply 'to exist' as the top AmigaOne model, then again it has succeeded.  The fact that this was the vehicle of the MAP, and Hyperion themselves chose the multicore hardware, suggests that Hyperions expected to develop the OS alongside the hardware to utilise this.
 

As concerns multi-processing, there are the foundations of multi-processor code in 4.1.6, but no - not really multi-processing yet. I think there may be beta testing going on, but that's really a 4.2 thing I think.

I'd love to see 4.2 come out with a good multiprocessor implementation (Hell, even offloading HD video decoding to a second CPU would be cool), OpenGL, Gallium, etc - but from Hyperion's track record on announcements that don't pan out, or are just never mentioned again, or turn out to be cripplingly slow, or years later than suggested (this is consistent behaviour over a decade) - I just don't trust them to deliver even as a bystander, and I'm most certainly not going to hand over money on the 'gentlemanly understanding' that seems to somehow exist between Hyperion and their customers atm.

If AmigaOS 4.2 does get released by the end of 2014, I'll quote you on this.

Please do. :-) I love fruit cake, and it's be a fun video to make.
EDIT: Just to be claer about timescales, you'll have to allow me a few days lead-time to prepare - the dried fruit needs soaking for at least 48 hours in advance of cake-making. :-)

And again - thanks for the post.  It's good to have healthy discussions, and criticism.

Thanks for the constructive engagement - it's nice to be able to discuss things without being labelled a troll, and interesting to gain insight into the 'happy customer's interpretation.

For me (not sure about others) I think I stopped seeing Hyperion/AmigaOS as a desirable option for my own use once I could no longer bring myself to swallow any doubts over ambguous statemtents and 'have faith' in their chosen direction. If they did ever release a product that is desirable in price point and features I'd consider buying it. But that would have to be features included in the current release, not 'promised' for a future one.

[Boot_WB]

Here's my analysis:

Every new business playing in an existing market, or creating a new market, and the Distribution of Innovation follow the same curve. They all invariably face what is referred to as The Chasm;

Isn't it amazing how if you squint, and make a line of best-fit, you can retrofit most any business theory onto past data (and especially future trend projections!).

Such theories can be a useful (if very crude) tool to promote discussion in boardrooms full of out-of-touch executives. The rest of the world outside the administrative reality-distortion field usually recognises these inane attempts to define the blatantly obvious as a 'theory' for what they are.

"Companies face challenges and have to adapt to engage with a changing market, changing opportunities and changing threats as time goes on."

No graph needed for that though, so wouldn't go down as well during a Powerpoint presentation. If you start proletysing about Sales Funnels I'm getting my coat. :-)