(Hmm, I banged most of this together last caffeinated afternoon, but decided I wasn't crazy enough to post it. But if y'all're still talking...)
Okay, let's see here...
Tao's still in business. There aren't a "lot" of devices using Intent, and most of those that do don't expose it to the user in a PC-like manner (meaning they're embedded systems, someone bought into Intent for convenience or portability or whatever, but the device isn't presenting a 'here, throw third-party software on me' interface to the average user anyway), but they still get design wins from time to time. The "OCPA" group, Tao's business toehold in Japan, just changed names to something else, claiming 'great success' (but then, who ever declares 'lukewarm success?'), and last I checked, the new organization hadn't released anything in English. Sony seems to remain interested, which is an 'interesting' sign.
Amiga... was supposed to be providing some sort of 'something' atop Intent, we all saw how that target shifted around. People were still working on things like the 'Ami2D' project long after it dropped off the radar... then the lawsuits really sunk in, and depending which color Kool-Aid you're drinking today, AInc. either drove itself into the ground or just pretended to or already had; it seems (fairly reasonable that) their investors might've been crazy enough to invest in Amiga, but weren't going to throw another round at it just to have it hoovered up in damages.
Then, *boomf,* once some of the financial risk clears, this KMOS thing happens, there's all this mysterious talk of McEwen being chastised for OS4 (while, in turn, that does seem to be what kept the property afloat and 'interesting' whatsoever -- the Amiga userbase may be small, but the Amiga Persecution Complex is a dangerous thing to harness), and the DE property is the first thing to ride the AInc.->ITEC->KMOS railroad... where a guy named Garry says he's more than happy to fulfill the DE porting obligation, and promptly brings 4 back under the same liability mantle anyway. (Well, maybe; what's Hyperion's is sort of Hyperion's, at least until they get paid*... and I forget the details of the last contract that was waved around in public.)
Now, while all this was brewing or getting ready to brew, a funny thing happened... The world blew up. Really; the handheld and entertainment space, at least in 'the west,' underwent a major collapse. In the late '90s, we were building up to a confusion of CPUs and OSes -- Palm, EPOC, WinCE, and who knows what else -- on a nicely diverse array of hardware -- 'Dragonball,' SuperH, ARM, x86, Coldfire, PowerPC... and much of that hardware was still a bit cramped to, say, run Mozilla on. The contraction took out Sega and Psion for a while, kneed back R&D at Nokia, gave Microsoft a good excuse to screw over Sendo, and suddenly Amiga's list of partners started looking rather weak. Some of the biggest customers for DE -- the ones that needed an 'unfair advantage,' as the old Commodore ads said -- dropped off the radar, leaving the ones already getting along just fine without it. There's still some diversity (XBox vs. PS2 vs. GC, x86 vs. PPC on the desktop, phones remain weird), but good luck scoring a preload deal.
Fast forward a little bit more, and you've got two more problems... first off, hardware has kept scaling, and with 'big, bloated Linux' the freest option, damned if most solutions aren't able to run it well; second, golly if the remaining CPUs left aren't diversifying by breaking out of the 'yet another superscalar chip with the same major features but a slightly different instruction set' assumption that made Intent so darn fast and potentially useful. Sure, it could/does still work, but the problem domain is shifting -- now the big wow factor will require porting back and forth from things like Cell... though it's true that Virtual Virtual Backgammon may not require the full array of the PS3's features. The window of opportunity for the 'kind of thin' devices DE as-we-knew-it favored seems to have gone; if it's hard to justify buying an A1, how many companies can justify designs around the sort of almost-but-not-quite-grunthy-enough specs that would 'require' the DE to shine?
(Answer: I dunno, but I'm still hoping for the day where I can walk down to Staples and buy a $50 generic Royal-type thing to be my webpad/note-taker/media player/802.11 phone/project-enabler du jour. In ten years, they'll probably be inkjet-printing that grade of device onto a single sheet of plastic... but they'll probably also have standardized on something from OpenCores.org, which could render the point moot, while Parrot may form $0 competition, if still requiring the chicken-and-egg grunt work of porting a C compiler to bootstrap it onto a new arch.)
Meanwhile meanwhile, Tao has added an interface stack to Intent that either conflicts with any possible AInc. value add or doesn't. Last I checked, it did, by providing the first wave of little niceties AInc. would've hoped to lay claim to... But if it turns out KMOS took DNA from the Friedens, buried it in a time capsule, had the time capsule dug up millenia hence, by some enlightened civilization which then sent the resulting clones back to start work decades earlier, and suddenly, when the time is ripe, Garry sledgehammers through the drywall of his office to find a CD-R with a working Quartz/OpenGL/DirectX-beating implementation dropped in when the place was built...
Well crap, they undershot, who do you think those original Amiga-funding dentists were, anyway? :-D (Don't ask about the third attempt... You've heard those rumors about Axl Rose?)
---
So yeah, um, I dunno. I always liked the thought of it as some sort of Java-DOS hybrid, the thin wedge that slides under whatever you're doing and can make it run wherever you want, distributable under the royalty-based structure if your project's marketable to the world at large. That requires 'you' -- the guy who's about to have this world-changing idea worth running on PDAs and microwaves and phones and desktops everywhere, that's going to make AInc. billions in royalties -- have access to it and the development tools in the first place, which, what with the licensing back-and-forth between Amiga and Tao, pretty much requires receiving the runtime as a preload on some device you own, and the development tools as a free download somewhere (considering the AInc. tools would be useless without a working license of Intent, and where are you going to get the right one if not from an AInc. licensee?)...
...but, since the best chances to take this vector have gone *pif,* and adding it to OS4 itself raises the underlying cost of OS4...
...it seems doomed to find its major market as a sort of B2B-sold 'middleware,' hence AA. (But but but, if I haven't lost track, someone's still obliged to hand something that looks and quacks like DE to Genesi, so that may force consideration of it as more of an 'OS-alike' product, or at least something where not every binary has to be digitally signed.)
---
My head hurts. Someone's still reading this?
Anyhow, on the cellphones-to-servers thing... we all know you can cram anything on a cellphone these days, Amiga (or probably a full x86 emulator running UAE) included. The 'server' zone is a little more amusing, because two of the big players are pushing virtual machines that just happen to run best on their hardware or their partners' (IBM, in contrast, seems to advocate the usual brute force million-monkeys approach, with a sprinkling of GPL dust**)... The Intent/DE feature set maps better to 'entertainment' than 'corporate' at first glance, but I'm still not sure it can come off worse than Java, even if you require a separate invocation of the machine per-process (look at how Java and Perl and probably even LISP are actually getting used in those environments) -- after all, that's what the whole AA/middleware approach entails anyway.
'Royalty' costs -- and thus revenue -- would be pretty darn low for corporate in-house apps, but that would give universities and so on the excuse to offer 'DE' vocational training, the same way they offer Microsoft and Java training today, creating more developers for the entertainment and shrinkwrap markets Amiga's decided to make its money from. (I have no idea how you actually dig out this niche, but pretending to have some sort of breakthrough in media streaming could be one way -- people still think Amiga is in some way good at that.) Then, of course, if OS5 would makes the most convenient and unified development environment, you might see some companies replace NT or Sun workstations with "Amigas," sure, while home users and individual nerds would continue hopping on for the same reasons OS X hasn't been a flop.
Maybe you don't take over the world, but do you need to, if everyone's making a living, money's coming in, R&D keeps rolling, and the True Believers stop posting drivel like this and find real jobs in relation to the new 'ecosystem'? Business ain't war, after all -- it's business.
---
*Yargh, I hate having to qualify statements, but I'm not making some snide joke, or insinuating anything about the current situation... I'm talking about how not receiving 'goods delivered' may have protected OS4 from being delivered to Genesi. It'd be hard -- or at least, far more contestable -- for a court to order me to deliver a car I've been thinking about buying, when it's still the property of the dealership. Even if it's blatantly obvious that I'm not going to get anywhere without it.
**Again, this sounds disparaging, but I'm just looking at it objectively. The GPL is an 'intangible' of sorts that makes geeks gasp relief, and reaps benefits of perspective and convenience that don't always quantify on TCO charts. It's *not* magic portability dust, and so IBM's finding strength in doing what they've always done best -- throwing brute force and big iron at the problem, keeping lots of geeks employed in the process (for some reason, managers are more likely to take suggestions from 'successful professionals' than the homeless), and seeing every contract on through to completion, no matter how ridiculous, as long as they get paid their price. Encouraging the GPL encourages removal of barriers and legal confusion that cause companies to throw out custom code and go shrinkwrap -- of course they're in favor of it!
