Phase 5 Digital Products comeback?

[Heiroglyph]

no. despite the degenerated image the community will likely not react reasonably to a reasonable offer. might sound like a conspiracy theory, while such an offer has usually been surpressed, invoking an expectation that i will be met with resistance, distrust and badmouthing anyway, by so called "usual suspects" (representing simply many if not everybody who either way doesnt care or dare not speak out anymore).

however some not very promissing iniatives went out under the radar so far, till it was too late. apollo/vampire sounds like an  example. am i right?

I'm not sure I understood your reply exactly.

Vampire is one that I would hold up as a good example of not saying a word until completion. Every great step they make is rewarded with about 50/50 congratulations and complaints of sill missing features. Well, duh, it's not finished.

I'd also say that there were a lot of mistakes due to it being represented publicly by engineer enthusiasts rather than business people. Their hearts were in the right place, but mistakes were made.

Our community overall is hard on anyone so IMHO, it's better to not engage us until you absolutely can't help it.

[Heiroglyph]

really??? i must be missing something in your logic. maybe our resemblance is different..

lets review, the natami approach, majsta going around asking for guidance, first vampire version, work in progress, kind of. tg68 core adoptation, 030/25 speeds. cheap. many bought only to find it discontinued in support after some time and arguably for a good reason. as much as none really complained. at least almost none of the customers.

okay, igor had survived some hard times but if from anyone then from other developers. then apollo team joined in or vice versa.

in my book it is nothing like a closed, behind the scenes apporach. on the contrary. you can simply chip in on irc and be invited to contribute. and it is in my book the right spirit.

I was speaking more to the Apollo/v2 versions.

The outright hatred shown because the work-in-progress core doesn't have an FPU yet gets pretty bad, not to mention the MMU.

As for the business side, Igor did everything humanly possible to lower the cost per unit but they finally realized that even making no profit and doing all the the labor themselves for "free", they couldn't hit the price they had put on the developer v500 boards and meet demand.

Once one of the dev boards (that were sold at or below cost so encourage development help BTW) went on ebay for big bucks, they started doing that themselves and stopped the loose flow of developer boards.

They also finally made the decision to do what they should have done in the first place and actually price the boards realistically and pay to have them produced so that they could meet demand.

Unfortunately the PR mistake was already made. Had they priced higher to begin with (both dev boards and projected final price) there would have been less flack thrown back at them as people probably wouldn't have balked at the new price considering what you get in comparison to other somewhat comparable CPU cards.

I'm not sure if you've been following those types of threads (some of which get quickly closed or deleted) but it's not pretty. Especially when you consider they were doing their best to help the community and simply weren't good with business and marketing.

Full disclosure, I'm helping them finish their SD card driver for free and it will be open source. I bought my v500 like anyone else just before the price change.

[Heiroglyph]

There is no hatred pointed at Apollo. It started as disappointment that Gunnar repeatedly said that he had no intention of doing a compatible FPU and MMU & instead worked on MMX. It has only got heated because the fan boi's validate Gunnar's decision by saying they don't want an FPU or MMU anyway and anyone that does should shut up and go away (the "I'm awesome, why could you possibly want to run different software than me unless you suck" argument).

I don't intend to derail the thread, but you can see where this validates my argument of silence until completion and not having the enthusiasts/engineers as your only PR people.

Either it would have those features completed on release or it would release as an EC or LC type CPU. No discussion, this is the product, buy it or don't. If sales aren't good because of it or there is enough feedback, maybe add the feature(s) in the next revision.

As much as I've held against them, I think Elbox might have the right strategy in releasing product and staying out of sight.

Compared to most Amiga companies they seem to have far less drama associated with them, at least since they stopped responding in public. Back when they did speak publicly they were nothing but drama.