In a utopian amiga society what could os4 have achieved?
I had high hopes when OS4 was announced for a yet to be announced PPC machine back in ~1996, I thought for sure Amiga would take over the world from the still crappy X86 clone boxes.
I had hopes again when OS4 was re-announced by Gateway in ~98, even though that OS4 was initially meant to be based on QNX. Later this was changed to Linux based and at the time I thought the world had ended, in actuality this was probably the best idea.
Hopes slightly rekindled in my mind in ~2000 when McBill and Fleecy bought out the Amiga trademarks and announced OS4 based on Intent. Not exactly what I was looking for, but maybe it would be neat. "On schedule and Rocking" came and went, hopes again faded.
Then came the Eyetech-Amiga-Hyperion backroom deal in early ~2002 and my hopes again were piqued, this seemed like exactly what I wanted and I became a fairly rabid red camper. I even pumped the coupon scheme in this forum, Amiga again would take over the world. By mid 2003 I had started to give up and jumped ship to a Pegasos/MorphOS combo (which was awesome, shame that died off). Even though OS4 alpha was finally released for the "AmigaOne" in ~2005, I had soured on what I felt was pathetic poor hardware. The fact OS4 wasn't released for classics until very recently, even my CSPPC cards were sold by ~2006.
Fast forward to today, I don't think OS4 will ever reach any more users than the current <2000 who use it. It has been 12+ years since OS4 was announced. Amazing.. The lawsuit(s) over OS4 cannot end well, there will be no winners. If anything remotely Amiga based has a future, it will probably be AROS.
Just my $0.02.
