CompuServe Messages

Bob, Well, you're right in some respects, but I disagree that you need an accelerated machine. I use Word on my 68000 Mac SE and it is quite agreeable. Text entry, formatting, re-formatting, etc. are respectably fast. I also use Aldus Pagemaker on the Mac (a 1.5 meg program file!) and although it runs sometimes painfully slow on some operations, is otherwise quite tractable. Given that graphic operations on the Amiga are much faster than on the Mac, I suspect that such programs would provide very satisfactory performance on an Amiga. Now, given that such companies already produce code that is 68000 compatible, the development costs for the Amiga are those marginal costs for dealing with the GUI and any machine dependencies (if any.) If CBM would underwrite those marginal costs those companies might be able to produce an Amiga version. I think that when you look at the capabilities of such programs as Excel, Word, Pagemaker, etc. that Amiga owners might be willing to pay the prices for what they would get. I would say that Word is easily 4 times better than the best wordprocessor available on the Amiga. In fact I would argue that if you took all of the best and unique features of EVERY Amiga wordprocessor and wrapped them into a single product, Word would still be 4 times better. That's my personal opinion. As for spreadsheets nothing on the Amiga is any better than Lotus 1.0. Excel and Lotus today far surpass anything available on the Amiga. Pagemaker is a magnitude better than any Amiga DTP program. As for database, we at least have SuperPro 4 which is about as good as you can get or need, although it is not the best, it is closer than are Amiga wordprocessors, spreadsheets, and DTP. As for graphics, we have some excellent stuff on the Amiga, but the competition in the Mac world is still ahead of the game in some respects. In development software we have CanDo, but similar products on the Mac and DOS worlds are better. CBM needs to get off the dime. The only way we will see such power on the Amiga is to provide developers