I know that many people were wondering - what will this bring to MS?
The answer is pretty simple - sales, sales and sales. Ask many techies and you would hear that back then, Amiga had the best games. period. MS people do remember Amiga quite well, and they signed a deal with Amiga Inc.
Amiga will get some money from the sales (but NOT all of it), and Microsoft will get some too, and that of-course will encourage sales of PocketPC/SmartPhone. After all - just like in the console area: it doesn't matter how bazillion polygons or how many millions of colors you can show - it's the content! Anyone remember the days of the competition between Commodore 64 and Atari 800/XL? who had more games? Commodore. Who was easier to program? Atari (well, at least in basic, with it's Atari DOS, etc).
MS has done this before - look at Windows 2000 and Windows XP - you'll see the disk defragment tool which is not written by MS, but from another company - that company (can't remember it's name) gets money from MS for their app, and people can upgrade to the fully commercial defragment tool. MS on it's side gets a hack of a good defrag tool..
So, congratulations to Bill and the Amiga Inc. team. Hope to see AOS 4.0 out of beta soon..
This reminds me a small question - does any beta tester managed to run Mac OS X on his beta board using MOL?
Thanks,
Hetz
