CompuServe Messages

Even outside of the Amiga market, there is some perception that the Amiga's major weakness was the company behind it. My favorite example of this was an article in a mainstream computing magazine called "Amiga: The computer that not even Commodore could kill." Also, for a large company, the price to buy the Amiga is chump change compared to its potential. While it's easy to be pessimistic about the odds of someone buying and continuing the Amiga line, there are in fact several strong reasons why this would be interesting to another company. The Amiga market is a very viable market. There are 5 million Amigas in the world, extrapolate maybe 3.5-4 million still in use (use defined as the main desktop system for a user). Even with the admittedly large caveats of lack of hard drives and processor speed, that's a big market to develop for. Obviously, in relation to DOS/Windows, it's nothing, but what about compared to OS/2? WP and other large companies have OS/2 products out there, and OS/2 has far less users than the Amiga. "But wait" you say, "OS/2 is used more by businesses as opposed to home users, and therefore has a greater revenue/product ratio." That's true, business will typically pay a higher average price per package. But look what's happened in the PC market. Borland started a trend which still hasn't really stopped, and that is selling software that's priced in the home user's budget range instead of the typical business. Suddenly, software can sell in both the business environment and the home environment. Recognizing this, both Microsoft and WordPerfect have started home consumer lines, in addition to their discounted business/productivity packages. MS's line of consumer product is doing extremely well. What this all boils down to is that it is no longer critical to be in the business market while the home consumer market, the Amiga's home (especially so overseas, less so domestically), is becoming much more important. Another reason is that there won't be another opportunity (in the foreseeable future) to get into the platform game. The Amiga has (I believe) enough critical mass in terms of users and software to make it a viable system to compete with Macs and PCs. Without a huge technology breakthrough, I cannot imagine someone successfully launching a new computer platform. If you want to be in that game, your only choice is the Amiga. Finally, the emerging European market has great potential for the Amiga. Europe is becoming progressively stronger as a market, especially in light of emerging free-market ecoomies. They need computers, but they don't have a lot of hard credit to buy them with. The Amiga 1200 is perfectly poised to take advantage of this market, whereas the price point is so sensitive that the Macs and PCs can't reasonbly compete. This, in my mind, is the strongest reason to continue to push the Amiga line. -Rusty Williams "It's 1/8 full, I tell you!"