Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!jesup From: jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com (Randell Jesup) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Subject: Re: Better support for A500 owners, not less (was Re: Future of 500) Message-ID: <15819@cbmvax.commodore.com> Date: 13 Nov 90 01:50:40 GMT References: <1990Oct13.035003.3737@isis.cs.du.edu> <90286.132554DXB132@psuvm.psu.edu> <62.2719a8e6@vger.nsu.edu> <1990Oct22.020502.7545@zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu> <1004@rulcvx.LeidenUniv.nl> Reply-To: jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com (Randell Jesup) Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA Lines: 72 In article jkh@bambam.pcs.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) writes: >Despite the fact that I'll eventually have a 3000, I'd still like to >make something usable out of my 500, and I feel that Commodore has >more-or-less abandoned the A500 folks. They're certainly happy enough >to market them as aggressively as ever, but have they offered any >additional peripherals? Nooooo. If the A590 is the best that they can >manage, we're in deep doo-doo. Sure the little 20Meg drive in the A590 is slow and small. It's also very cheap. However, it has that nice fast DMA SCSI port (same as the A2091, essentially the same as the A3000) sitting there ready for you to plug in a nice fast quantum or maxtor or wren, and you'll have disk I/O speeds as good as a 2000HD. Add to that the 2M of sockets and it's a nice little box - fairly cheap for the A500 owner on a budget, and with with a lot of potential power. You can even yank the 20Meg and drop in a 3.5" SCSI drive (the connector is already there). > As it is, I'm left to scan the >peripheral company adds anxiously hoping to see the words "A500 model" >buried somewhere amidst the 1001 other offerings for the 2000. When it >comes to memory, HD's or processor cards, the 2000 folks have it made. >The A500 folks are considerably less lucky. We bought it, and >Commodore was happy enough to take our money, but now we're out to >sea. This sucks. Why do you think we can sell the A500 so cheaply? It's because you don't need all the fancy casework, much bigger PS, etc, etc. You can put a processor slot and a Z-II slot in an A500-like machine, but it would cost considerably more. I can't talk about any future machines, of course, but I'm sure everyone out there realizes we're always looking at our product line and thinking about how we can improve it (not just as individual models, but the line as a whole). >DEC realized long ago that peripheral sales were where the real money >was at. Commodore seems content to leave almost the entire area of >such sales to third parties who are making big $$$ on it. Doesn't >Commodore have any responsibility to its shareholders? If SUN or DEC >offered up their underbelly on something like this, the stockholders >would scream blue murder. Then again, if the 3rd parties didn't do things that were somewhat risky, or very niche-oriented, or provide some choice, then the Amiga might not exist anymore. We do peripherals, especially ones with a fairly large potential customer base (A590, A2091, A2065 (ethernet), the infamous ULowell card (largely for the Unix folk), etc). We can't cover every niche, and if we did we'd drive away all the 3rd parties, who are willing and able to take risks we can't, or know markets better than we could, or have lower overhead or faster turnaround. >I realize that these views may come across as a bit strong, but I >really do get the distinct feeling that while Commodore will be >perfectly happy to sell another half million A500's, they're going to >be putting all the design effort into their 2000 and 3000 lines. This >can't help but seem like robbing the masses to help the elite (not >that the "masses" are all that poor either! All those pennies add up). I think you're being overly pessimistic. Sure we'd like to sell 500,000 A500s in the coming year. We'd rather sell 1,000,000, and if paying attention to the A500 (peripherals, redesign, or whatever might help sales) will help, I think it's a good assumption we're interested. Another thing to realize is that while a lot of the Amiga sales in the USA are A2000s or better, most of our sales elsewhere are A500's, so it's _very_ important to us as a company. As usual, I speak only for myself (and then within obvious limits), and NOT for Commodore Amiga, Commodore International, or Commodore Business Machines. -- Randell Jesup, Keeper of AmigaDos, Commodore Engineering. {uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, jesup@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com BIX: rjesup Common phrase heard at Amiga Devcon '89: "It's in there!"