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Amiga dropping plans for new machine
Jesper Svennevid came in with the
hook-up to yet another Amiga story (YAAS). It now appears that Gateway/Amiga has dropped plans to build a new computer, and are going to work on creating a "simplified Internet interface". The article also talks about Amiga wanting to go into "home-networking", competing with Sun and others.
"Amiga will be the Internet-appliance infrastructure company. We don't intend to build anything," says a source close to the company.
If there's one thing Amiga has proven itself to be incredibly good at over the last few years, it would have to be "not building anything." So this looks like a sensible strategic move, given that they seem to be recognizing and leveraging their core competency.
PS-- Sarcasm. Humor. :-)
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We all take pink lemonade for granted.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Now is the time for Amiga fans to face the fact that Amiga Inc is not going to do anything to preserve or advance the Amiga values. Come with us to QNX Neutrino -- it will be glorious!
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Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think it's time to let it go... flame me if you want, but that's what I think. Sorry.
Remember the article in Wired News about a computer generating better ad copy than human writers?
:}
Well, they hooked that computer up to the Internet, and have it generating "buzz".
Really, has anyone ever met an actual human being who works for "Amiga"? Or are they just randomly generating press releases based on buzzwords and standard IT industry plotlines?
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Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
We've seen this before: CDTV.
Ages ago they took an A500 and crammed it into a VCR-like consumer device. Sales were a flop, and I suspect they will be again, because of lack of a market opportunity.
If they want to go after the web-surfing market, then they have problems:
1. Established low end competition - WebTV $199 and WebTV Classic $99. Very cheap, good enough for light surfing. Even the Sega Dreamcast $199 has the ability.
2. Bundles - The free or close to free PCs bundled with internet access.
3. Cheap general purpose computers - Your average $750 PC, except now you also have a general purpose computer.
4. Higher end - The ubiqitous $2000 home computer. Many people are willing to pay $2000 because it's what they think they can spend.
Where is there room for them to play?
Don't mind all the confusion coming out of Amiga lately, they just drunk.
If there's ever been a more anti-Free company in existence, I can't imagine who it would be.
A little background to that statement:
Phase5 is a outstanding hardware manufacturer. Their gear is good. However, their software side is a bit crazy. Last year, they released the Amiga-famous CyberStormPPC accelerator, which shoehorned a PowerPC 604e and a 68060 (exact CPUs depending on the model you chose) onto the same board. Yes, that's right, many modern Amigas are asymmetric multi-processors. Anyway, P5 released an initial stub API to developers so that lots of new PowerPC apps could be written. Another company, Haage & Partner, didn't like the new kernel, called PowerUp; they felt it was un-Amiga-like, so they wrote their own, called WarpUp.
Nothing too interesting (except for those of us with new boards on order) - until P5 decided to change their API, cutting the feet out from under their early-adopter developers. PowerPC applications that had been written and tested suddenly quit working, and P5's publicity department went to town blaming those 3rd-party coders. In backlash, many switched over to the competing (and incompatible) WarpUp system.
This is where it gets really fun. P5 didn't like the migration one bit. In the early days after the boards' release, flash firmware was being constantly updated to iron out last-minute bugs. P5 re-worked those new flashes so that WarpUp could no longer even be loaded, no matter how badly the end user wanted to use that system.
Their explanation and defense?
They developed the hardware, so it was their system. If they wanted to re-engineer their firmware in such a way that users were forced to use their OS, then they should be allowed to.
I, like many other people, got caught in the crossfire. My shiny new hardware could only use half of the software written for it, and the decision of which kernel to use was taken out of my hands.
No, people, you don't want to rely on Phase5 for your new hardware. They are terribly (and I chose that word on purpose) likely to decide, for you, what software you are allowed to run on it.
Not even Intel/Microsoft managed to pull that one off.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Phase5 (who does the best PPC and video upgrades for the Amiga) has been working on an Amiga replacement for years (the project used to be called A\\Box). They have announced a pretty sweet new version of the Amiga for early next year using the QNX kernel. They're at www.phase5.de.
Unlike Gateway, it appears they really are going to do it.
The Amiga wasn't just about a computer.. to me anyway the Amiga was a community, and a set of developers who we all respected, and some applications that we loved (partly because we all kinda knew the people who were working on them)...
:)
I don't think this is something that can ever be recaptured as Amiga. It's too late for that now. Be has the same flavour to it (are there any Amiga people involved in that?) as did the Atari Lynx and the 3DO.. both of those had some of the Amiga crew onboard at some point.
The Linux community is the same way, really, but it's grown so big that it's really hard to feel like you're a part of it these days. (Maybe that's what will make the Hurd catch on).
Anyone else remember Dave Haynie and RJ Mical and Jay Minor and Bryce Nesbitt and Dale Luck and the rest of the original Amiga crew?
Whatever happened to Leo Schwab anyway?