CompuServe Messages

Rich, 'The right tool for the job' is a good rule to live by. Many people in the user community develop fanatical loyalty at the expense of productivity and good sense (hence the proliferation of PCs). Based on the description of your job, the Amiga is the wrong tool. It would be like using a hammer to drive a screw – not impossible, but difficult and messy. One of the problems of the Amiga is that the company never deifined the machine's mission and never let the market guide them in this respect. It won it's general recognition as a video tool. CBM could have used that as a base to become an even wider MM tool (they tried that too with too little to late). They never took advantage of multi-tasking and multi-platform emulation (the bridge board was always an after thought) to put it in the proper place in the coporate tool box. (After all, it is corporate sales and prevelence that drove the PC into the home market and probably accounted for many Mac sales in the home market as well). So, you should be happy that the Mac is there for you in as the proper tool to do your job. I'm in video. I'm happy to have the Amiga's as they are at present, by far a superior tool for video. My dissappointment is that C= never figured out the machine it tried to market. If they had, we would not be where we are today. Video people and computer people hardly talked to each other until the Toaster came along. That natural marriage made Mac and PC developers take notice and has JVC, Panasonic, Sony, RCA, NBC, etc, etc, very nervous, if NAB is any indication (full court press to keep the analog video world alive with a few 'digital peripherals' and hype to keep the artificially high prices in the stratosphere). The Amiga/Toaster proved that video doesn't HAVE TO have costs equal to the national debt to produce quality stuff. It proved that efficient multi-tasking is possible. Unfortunatley it also proved that a technically superior product can be killed by dead-head management and lack of marketting even in its niche market. The best screwdriver to date bites the dust…. maybe. BTW, I didn't find the post offensive in any way. It was well reasoned. I just think your main reason for disappointment is that the Amiga seems to have, by definition, tailored itself more to Multi-Media/Video even from the time when MM was not yet a coined buzz word. It is only recently with the later versions of PageStream that it could compete in DTP with low end to moderate publishing tasks, and not the level of publishing tools you need. wmc – via Autopilot!