| From: | Anthony W. Prime |
| Date: | 2 Apr 2001 at 15:33:09 |
| Subject: | Re: Amiga announcements - any questions? |
On Mon, 02 Apr 2001, David Stroud waxed lyrical:
>This list has been strangely quiet on the St. Louis front up to now... has
>anyone heard anything from the show, or are you all too confused to say
>anything just yet? :-)
As far as I can see St. Louis was a bit of a non-event. I posted on the
mailing list some weeks ago that I now tend to take Bills trailers with a
pinch of salt, as he seems to be more Collas than Collas :).
Sure the tie up with Sharp looks useful, but Sharp don`t seem to see any
marketing milage in the Amiga name, choosing to highlight Java and Linux
instead. Of course Java and Linux are very "in vogue" at the moment, but if
the DE was as special as it needs to be to establish itself surely Sharp
would be trumpeting it`s inclusion as the next big thing. Also whilst Sharp
is a big name, Bill told us that we would be impressed by the "main"
partners. I hope there are other partners still in the wings, because Sharp
doesn`t really impress me that much. They have a decent track record but it`s
not /that/ impressive. I think I`d have rather seen a link with Sony to
provide environments for their laptops and Playstation2, or with Palm or
Psion and say Nokia to produce a truly compelling mobile platform, because if
Amiga are to make it big it`s not enough to do existing things slightly
better than the established players. The next change in computing will be
revolutionary, but I`m not sure what it will be, who will deliver it, or when.
On the subject of the classic line and the classic OS. This is probably where
the Classic OS and I part company. I`ve spent lots of money on a highly
specced x86 setup to be able to run the DE and through backward compatibility
AmigaOS. I can`t justify the cost of a standalone PPC machine to retain
current Amiga applications with (at best) only small scale ongoing
development plans.
By splitting OS4 and the DE in two, and tying OS4 to PPC that seals its fate.
As Mikey C said, in this way it remains a minority OS in a backwater. It also
says something about the DE that it has not been possible to provide classic
emulation within it. What level of application can we expect the DE to be
capable of carrying from system to system? Is it really going to be any
better than the current crop of JVMs? One of the earlier strengths stated of
the DE was the ready back catalogue of classic line software. Now, it seems
this "great strength" is lost. Are the wheels finally coming off.
Sorry if all this sounds a bit negative, but I think it`s only realism :/
http://www.amiga.com So the world may know...
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