Now I am taking a wild guess here but I reckon that most people who still part of the Amiga community are thirty something’s who either have had a Amiga from around the time they first came out during the late 80's early 90's and have been a keen devotee for many years or you have the other group (which I fall in) who had a A500,A600,A1200 or CD32 when they first came out, sold them on a few years later and forgot about the scene until years later have been trying to reacquire a collection of machines they wanted when they were younger but couldn’t afford it at the time.
I am very nostalgic about Amiga’s and when I talk to other members of my peer group they share fond memories of their Amiga’s or dare I say it in this forum their Atari's. However, when I mention that there is a new Amiga called the A1 that is when the romanticising ends. People will not by the product because it generally seems all cloak and dagger and there is not enough information to justify the purchase of what is to be fair a very expensive motherboard. I for one have not contemplated purchasing one because I don’t know what software/games are available for it.
I believe Amiga Inc or whoever holds the rights to build a new generation of Amiga’s should look at a two tiered approach to the product. In addition to the A1 There should be a low cost console style Amiga which I guess similar in concept to the CD32, it could be based on the more high end A1 which would be developed at the same time to offer it’s more hard core users greater expandability over its console style brother.
I know there are already products out there in the market place which do this already like the Xbox, icube etc but the one thing that Amiga has got is the brand image. This is why the MINI has sold so well and there was a waiting list for so long. the BMW MINI as about a Mini as my little finger is, but BMW sold the idea to it's customers and they bought into it, the same as the Beetle yes it looked like the classic beetle on the outside but what people were was a over priced VW Golf with a new body and flower vase. Why do people buy Mac's or use Linux? Because it's a way of sticking two fingers up at Microsoft and the PC community because their product is perceived to do any job the PC can do but better and more securely.
Although I slated the BMW MINI (I once owned two classic Minis a few years ago) I think it is a model that the Amiga community should adopt and I know has done to a certain extent with the A1. BMW took the essence of the original MINI and effectively built it from new from the ground up (Okay it shares it's chassis with the BMW compact but that's just splitting hairs). This is what I believe should be the strategy of the Amiga community for the future. The age group that has the most disposable income and buy's the most computer games is the same age group that started of with an Amiga; the Thirty-something’s.
Build and Market an Amiga which has the spirit and essence of the early Amiga’s but has the practicality of a console and is the centre of the Digital home (Remember the CDTV) so when Dad has finished playing the retro games on the Amiga console little jimmy then uses it to do his home work and play Quake 5. Big Sis records her favourite soaps and browses the forums to find and chat to her friends. This is what the Amiga’s of yesteryear could do, they provide a complete home computer experience to their owners and they did it well.
Come on Amiga Inc there is a board out there crying out to be adapted to a low cost console styled computer. The next generation Xbox will be based on the PowerPC processor so there should be an opportunity to port games that will be released on the Xbox. Remember the one thing you have going for you is that your not Microsoft
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Thanks for listening
