Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!knuth!mjbtn!raider!elgamy!elg From: elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM (Eric Lee Green) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: Mac and Amiga (Games--Macintosh vs A500) Message-ID: <00669086048@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM> Date: 16 Mar 91 01:14:08 GMT References: <7920@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <7816@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <1991Mar14.052507.19830@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <7906@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <1991Mar14.233243.29563@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> Organization: Eric's Amiga 2000 @ Home Lines: 51 From article <7920@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>, by blissmer@expert.cc.purdue.edu (Kevin): > Well actually this is a very serious point about the Amiga. The main reason > "big" software developers ignore the amiga. The Amiga has the most pirates Really? I thought that the dubious piracy honor went to the Atari ST folks, where there's a pirate on every street corner. A tale: I recently bought an ancient 8088 XT Bridgeboard for my Amiga 2000. It was being sold off from a store that went out of business, so I got it at a price I couldn't pass up -- $100. Installed it, and presto... one useless hunk of hardware. Need software, right? No problemo. Mention it to a friend. "Oh here. Take PC Tools. And Procomm. And ...". I didn't take him up on the offer, I'd already downloaded some basic tools from BIX, certainly good enough for my purposes, but the point remains the same -- piracy is as rampant on MS-DOS machines as it is on any machine. And nobody has accused MS-DOS piracy of killing the software market. The reason: There's just so MANY of them out there, and they're being bought by BUSINESSES, which have the money to spend on a copy of 1-2-3 here, a copy of Autocad there. *THAT* is why big software companies aren't developing for the Amiga. There's just not enough paying customers out there to make a big-budget product worthwhile. > We'll see what the judge rules. Paperback already lost to Lotus on look and > feel. A major disaster, in my view. I was once part of a partnership that wrote a BBS program... we had been running a BBS using the current leader in the field at that time (1985), and were seriously disappointed with many bugs and misfeatures. Our BBS program ended up with a user interface quite similar to the competitor's... but that's because it's what we were accustomed to, and what was "standard" at the time. Under the hood, our guts were all "new and improved", and we had features that the competitor didn't have. This set off a two-year "features war", where we and the competition hop-skip-and-jumped over each other. Each vendor's product was better at the end of this period of time. If the competition had been allowed to rest on their look-and-feel laurels, we'd still be in 1985. BTW, Workbench 2.0 looks quite a bit closer to the Macintosh than Workbench 1.3 did. I suspect that if Commodore ever manages to MARKET the Amiga, and get substantial numbers into traditionally-Mac markets, Commodore will be the next target. After all, Commodore *DOES* have a garbage can in the root directory (remember Apple's forcing Digital Research to change the garbage can design for GEM?). Surely this is "significantly close enough" to make Commodore infringe on Apple's copyright? (Well, I don't think so, but that's because I'm a human being, not a lawyer). -- Eric Lee Green (318) 984-1820 P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509 elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM uunet!mjbtn!raider!elgamy!elg Looking for a job... tips, leads appreciated... inquire within...