Slashdot Mirror
CEO of Amiga, Inc. Interviewed
vlangber submitted an interview with Bill McEwen about the current state of Amiga, Inc. and their plans for the future. Bill says,
"[W]e established the concept and vision of a scalable, embeddable, multi-threaded, memory protected operating system or digital environment that would run from a cell phone to a server. This is what you are going to see us deliver."
While Amiga OS4 has been in pre-release since 2004, a final release is planned for later this year.
Can it do the old Amiga trick of grabbing the menu bar and pulling down to reveal the window below it, which could actually be of a different screen resolution?
This may sound like a small, silly thing to stick on, but it does work to remind me that the Amiga was a unique combination of clever programming AND clever hardware at a special time in computing history - What makes this new Amiga an Amiga beyond just sharing a name?
I hope it's not Guru Meditations...
They are attacking the problem as the underest underdog. But just from the quote in the summary, I can predict they will need to change that guy before they can succeed.
No company ever got successful with a single product that was applicable to all levels of possible applicability. Microsoft is successful because it makes ubiquitous desktop software, not because Windows XP is modular and its kernel lightweight and fast and embeddable. Sun makes a great VM that really runs well on servers, but it's not exactly a common language among the masses. IBM's AS400 is a pretty neat system, but I wouldn't want it as my mom's computer.
You need to pick your niche and carve it out before you go about trying to make your product ubiquitous. Success comes when people see your product and know immediately where it is applicable. Growth comes when you get them to see it applicable to their domain as well. However, if they don't see the first part, they won't accept the second part.
I knew a photographer who was pretty decent at any sort of photography that a client could dream up. From detailed macro work to poster-quality landscape work, this guy did it all. He had to do it as a hobby because he couldn't get enough work from his clients. He decided to nail down what his acceptable project type was and decided on industrial equipment photography. He can't take a vacation or spend his millions of dollars in profits because his phone is always ringing with new offers for work. By limiting his range of work, he became much more visible to those people who would hire him. Until he did that, he was just another guy among the crowd.
Amiga is just another guy among the crowd.
a hardcore Amiga fan back in the day. So were all my friends. I loved my Amiga 500... it got me through a CS degree when there was little to no chance of getting enough time on the departments own systems to do my project. And wow what an operating system... it made Windows 3.1 look positively stupid. The Amiga defined and fit the zeitgeist of that time perfectly and will always hold a special place in my heart. Then there was the day Amiga corp. died (to the tune of bye-bye Ms. American pie). All us CS nerds felt like Elvis had just died. I stayed with my Amiga for years after, even though the parent company were long gone. It had a special place for me as it had unfailingly been there for me when I needed it and we had been through some of the best times of my life together. However eventually it was beyond impossible to deny any more that my little buddy had seen his day and I sadly moved over to PC.
However, now is not then, and we're all grown-up now with our business laptops. Where on earth can Amiga find a market now? They're not even close to being the same company or attempting to appeal to the same market. Is the market demnographic that defined the original Amiga buyer even still there?
Even the Amiga vision and sense of community has been fulfilled by Linux, which has unassailable advantages over Amiga Os and any other commercial product in that you can download for free and install on the hardware that you have already. I would love to see Amiga OS on sale again but I'm not sure even I could really find a need for it other than some misplaced sense of nostalgia, which would probably fade as soon as I booted it and realised I didn't recognise the new AmigaOs at all. Another nice OS with no third parties writing apps or games for it? If I wanted that I'd buy OS/X.