CompuServe Messages

"Now just imagine how much higher those numbers would have been with proper marketing" Well, there's not much to be gained by "what might have been" thinking. In going through the ZiffNet databases, it was really kind of sad to see how Commodore blew it. Re-read a Forbes article that appeared in 1989 talking about Irving Gould and how lousy a job he was doing then. The grim reality though is that any kind of "rescue" effort is probably at least two or three years too late and even if mounted would require hundreds of millions of dollars in capital to have a hope of succeeding on a mass market basis. I can easily see the Amiga continuing on as a niche market machine (i.e., video, kiosks, etc.), but not as a mass market product. The market is just too competitive and far too skewed toward PC-compatibles with Apple taking up a distant second and ever more tenuous place. Some financial analysts, for example, think that Apple will sell only only 700,000 PowerMac's this year, 30% down from Apple's own projections of a million machines. This will probably put lots of pressure on Apple to cut PowerMac prices earlier than planned. Coupled with IBM's release of PowerPC desktop machines (in addition to the workstations already in the market), there are lots of alternatives available for the prospective user, especially as more applications are ported over to the PowerPC and Pentium platforms. Without getting into technical superiority arguments, it's a heck of a lot easier for a dealer to sell a PC-compatible or Apple machine than it is to sell an Amiga, no matter whose name is on the Amiga. The game market is taking some major hits as well. Atari is not doing overly well with its machine, 3DO devices aren't selling well and dealers are happy carrying only Sega and Nintendo, especially as the number of titles increases for these devices, forcing them to allocate more shelf space to the hot-selling items. People with capital generally tend to put it where the risk is the lowest: and that sure doesn't describe the desktop computer or video game market at this point in terms of introducing what amounts to a "new" platform. ("New" in the sense that most people in the market either haven't heard of Commodore or Amiga or have written them off a long time ago.) In short, it's a very tough market out there and, in my opinion, that doesn't auger well for the Amiga except as a niche machine. Jerry