CompuServe Messages

"This is however not the way things are with most Amiga dealers…" Doesn't that lead to the question of who many of these Amiga dealers are? Why would anyone interested in making big bucks sell Amiga in the first place? Strikes me that they would be trying to get Apple, Dell, IBM or other dealer medallions. From the very few Amiga dealers I've personally dealt with (aside from specialist video dealers), I get the impression that I'm dealing with the bottom of the barrel. My local "dealer", if you can even call them that, operates out of a storefront that a self-respecting rat wouldn't call home. While the people aren't unfriendly, they sure as heck don't know diddly about what they're selling (which unfortunately is true of almost all dealerships these days). Old software versions line the walls, inviting the unwary to buy obsolete stock. In short, it's not the kind of place you'd want to visit or purchase from. There are good Amiga dealers, I'm sure. I just haven't run into them. So far my experience in mail ordering stuff for the Amiga has been pretty bad. Only one dealer (DevWare) has been honest enough to tell me when they didn't have a product. But, on the other hand, I'm still waiting for the promised 3D diskette you get when you register CroutonTools. My own feeling remains that the Amiga could be a neat niche product, producing maybe $20,000,000 – $50,000,000 a year and could attract some really good specialty dealers who rely on superior service to keep customers coming back. Oddly enough, it strikes me that there's probably a marketing opportunity out there right now for someone to create a mail-order Amiga place that offers efficient, honest service. One big problem, though, is that buying Amiga software and peripherals is really a pig-in-the-poke situation. The Amiga magazine reviews strike me as being less than objective and there are few places where you can actually sit down and see how something works. Returning Amiga stuff is a real grind with some of these places, as other postings have noted. Jerry