[rescue] fwd: Linux Foundation Prepares For Microsoft's Legal Action

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Sat, May 19, 2007 at 05:03:55PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:

> You need to read "On The Edge" (www.commodorebook.com) - it was really
> idiotic management that doomed the Amiga, not software piracy.

It was a running joke among us that "Commodore could not sell water
in the desert". However you look at it, the Amiga was never a serious
contender to the PC in the general market. 

It was originaly sold as a games machine, but there were few games and
they were expensive (compared to PC games), hard to find (there were
few Amiga dealers), and did not take advantage of things like hard
disks.

A games machine without games does not sell very well. A games machine
that people won't buy games for  won't get games developed for it,
and with no games, no one will buy the computers.

I never said that software piracy was what doomed it, it was the requirment
that you had to pirate the games to get them to run that IMHO doomed it.
Most people who did not buy games, did not pirate them either, they
just gave up and spent their hardware dollars on other platforms.

By the time the Amiga started to show some real promise, the PC had
caught up to it in speed and capability and Apple slashed the price
of Macintosh computers.

I know a TV studio had a room full of them to do specialty graphics for
a TV show, and many found themselves into use as Video titling machines.
To be honest, I never watched that show, I think it was about submarines.

The CD-TV never really took off, though you may be able to arribute that
to bad managment, choosing to hitch their fate to the failed CD-I.

I know there eventually was a fairly good TCP/IP implementation for it,
but as far as I remember it never was really part of the operating system,
and ended up being sold by a third party.

I even remember Wil Wheaton, in his "punk" days, after leaving Start Trek,
going on tour selling New-Tek Video Toasters. 

I also remember taking copies of the magazine I wrote for to London 
with me on vacation and visting the one store that had Amigas. 
It seems to me for some unfathomable reason, the Amiga did well in
Germany, but once the novelty wore off, usually between the "wow it can
do that" and "here's the money" phases, very few were sold elsewhere.

I even did a lecture on computer music using an amiga at TCF.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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