Software companies and small markets

[mdwh2]

mikeymike wrote:
But hardware manufacturers (in order for them to stick around commercially) are particularly going to want you to upgrade your A1 more often then when something goes permanently wrong, the question is, how do they do that?  Wintel does it by producing a resource-hogging OS

I think it was true that the requirements of Windows encouraged people to upgrade during the 90s, but I don't think it's true these days. Any old CPU, hard drive, graphics card and so on is more than enough for Windows - people upgrade these for other reasons (eg, games, mp3s). The biggest remaining constraint for Windows is probably RAM, but this is getting pretty cheap too.

So I'd hope that people are encouraged to upgrade by having good software which takes advantage of new hardware, rather than it simply being wasteful and bloated.

[mdwh2]

Doobrey wrote:
 I think it`s more a question of what the  remaining companies like Elbox etc can do to stay in the Amiga market once people stop spending money on the classic amigas.
 

I think there's still some room for Amiga-specific development. For example, possibly accelerator cards for faster PPCs (I forget what sort of CPU upgrades the AmigaOne or Pegasos use - whether it's a socketed CPU, or something else). Or alternatively hardware specifically designed with AmigaOS in mind - for example, have a look at http://www.villagetronic.com/ - whilst they seemed to have dropped support for the Amiga, they seem to be happily selling graphics cards for the Mac, even though it uses standard PCI cards. Presumably they differentiate their products from standard PC ones by adding things like software, drivers and support.