CompuServe Messages

I was at the NCTA show in Dallas. The Scala booth (really an open area with seating for a couple dozen people and a video wall) was attractive and always seemed to have people around. The demos were great. I missed you, but spoke with a number of your colleagues, including Michael Sinz. I was all over that 200,000 sq. ft. exhibit floor and Scala's demo was easily the most impressive. It made the cable converter set-top interfaces in other areas look sick. Right after viewing the Scala booth demo, I went to a workshop and watched one of the presenters, a cable industry exec, struggling to make his relatively static slide-show presentation — done on a PC-based Novell software presentation package — work as intended. He had to reboot Windows twice. Crude, crude, crude. I noted that Scala has signed on with some developers of set-top hardware (you could see the evidence of Scala's presence in several other booths) and will be interested to see the results. I also noted that Scala has thrown in with the group that's supporting the Microware DAVID set-top OS alternative to Microsoft's software. Smart. The only marketing problem you may have: The software is so adept and the presentation so fast and slick that casual viewers could be excused for assuming there was a big fat "black box" hidden under the table, doing things impossible for an ordinary user. Of course, we know that black box is an Amiga. While the Scala folk were very interested in talking Amiga one on one, the platform was not mentioned in any of the print or oral presentations. I understand why, but it was amusing to see what appeared to be the Amiga version of the software being used to pitch a PC product. Either that, or the multimedia OS you're using for the PC version depends on Amiga-style device names like DH0: 🙂 A couple of the Scala people I spoke with let slip that the PC version will be available on CD-ROM with numerous demo scripts. Hopefully they will be readable by the Amiga version, and hopefully use Amigans will get a discount for "upgrading" (not really!) to the CD-ROM version, so I can get my hands on those demos and all the attendant clip art, backgrounds, etc. The only mystery left unanswered: Whether the PC version will be dongled. 40,000 Amiga users of Scala! That's big sales in our realm. Chances are, the PC version could do half a million pieces, in that event.