Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cbmvax!grr From: grr@cbmvax.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Amigans Unite - need help against pompous PC-oid! Message-ID: <2645@cbmvax.UUCP> Date: Wed, 28-Oct-87 11:29:00 EST Article-I.D.: cbmvax.2645 Posted: Wed Oct 28 11:29:00 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 31-Oct-87 10:31:20 EST References: <131@otl.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <2984@xanth.UUCP> Reply-To: grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA Lines: 109 Keywords: Sic' em, boy! In article <2984@xanth.UUCP> kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: > > [LONG reposting omitted - see the referenced article] > > Before a lot of you loyal Amigans jump all over this IBM fan's case, > take a look at the negative comments he made. Aren't these exactly > the same bitches we've been passing back and forth about the Amiga for > a couple of years now, among ourselves? Among friends criticsm is > taken to be meant to be constructive, but it hurts when an outsider > says it. Still, a company that publishes a buss standard, changes it > while the machine is still being sold, and then replaces it for the > next upgrade, obsoleting all the add on hardware (yours and mine > included) DOES have a "game machine" mentality. Responsible companies > don't do this kind of stuff to their users. Apple canned the Apple III completely. Apple canned the Lisa and had nothing to offer but the Macintosh, only the MAC II finally comes close in features and market placement. IBM changed from the PC bus to the AT bus and announced that most of the PC cards would not be supported in the AT. IBM dumped the PC/AT bus, an industry defacto standard for the micro-channel. IBM constantly announces new products with only enough backward compatibility to allow exiting users to upgrade before it's too late. DEC had three incompatible I/O busses on the PDP-8 family, two or three on the PDP-11, and god knows how many on the VAX family. SUN changed their expansion bus between the SUN-2 and SUN-3, did they change it between the SUN-1 and SUN-2 also? SUN has decided that some SUN-3 peripherals will not be supported on SUN-4 configurations, even though you can plug them in and the software supports them. TI walked away from away from the home computer market entirely, turning a computer that was a slow as beans, but had a real operating system and real expansion capability into scrap metal and plastic. TI dumped their low-end minicomputer compatible office systems in favor of incompatible PC compatibles. Radio Shack changes models every year or so with compatibility a sometimes sort of affair, This doesn't mean that Commodore is eligible for sainthood, but from this perspective, there were good reasons for changing the expansion bus. It's quite unfortunate that it couldn't have been done sooner so that those few developers who actually followed the specifications didn't get jerked around. > It is obvious that a lot > of the innovation ability left with the Los Gatos crowd. I have said > often to anyone that will listen that IBM set back the microcomputer > world five years by luring all the development talent into making > clones just a little cheaper. It makes me very sad that the folks > left at CBM thought this was the path of the future. This kind of > thinking wasn't part of the Los Gatos effort, which is why the A1000 > was such a big win. Come on, blow the smoke away and look at the facts. Amiga was about to either go out of business or sell the dream to the dreaded Jack Tramiel at Atari. Commodore made a $$$MASSIVE$$$ investment that brought the Amiga from a prototype to a production unit and funded a bunch of internal and third-party software work. The resulting product was exciting and sold reasonably well, but didn't represent a major part of Commodore's business in terms of volume or profits. Now what does Commodore do? Go back to C64's or game consoles? Come up with something with the look and feel of the Amiga, but none of the features? Just add a little memory, tweak the chips and hope the original market niches aren't saturated? Nope, Commodore decides to throw it's weight behind the Amiga, makes another big $investment$ and introduces two new products intended to correct the perceived market limitations of the original. One retains the features that made the A1000 attractive to the recreational users, but through tradeoffs like the integral keyboard and separate power supply, can be priced low enough to appeal to a broader user community, and can be sold without complicated technical explanations of why it's really twice as good as the cheaper Atari machines. The other model adds features intended to address the concerns of the professional or business user who sees the computer as a tool or a means to an end. The key features identified here were a reliable, internal expansion capability and some form of IBM compatibility so that this Amiga user doesn't need to have *two* computers on his desktop. Now I suppose it's natural for someone bought an A1000 to argue that this was the perfect machine, since it's the one they decided to buy. These people often seem to object to any changes, without much concern as to why we made the changes, or take the other extreme and insist that we should have made radical changes, and why are we wasting time. Some even like the paint the people in West Chester as either evil beings or dullards who don't understand the difference between an Amiga and an IBM PC! To wind this diatribe down, the task at hand at least from the engineering point of view is simple. First, ensure the survival of the Amiga, in both the corporate and market arenas, and second, get to work on new products to make sure the Amiga retains its advantages in the years to come. If we succeed, then we get to be heroes, though not gods. If we fail, there's no confusion about who to blame. Does anybody remember what Bob Pariseau said around the time of the Amiga launch? Something along the line of we're here to give you a computer, not a religion. Some people seem to have become confused in this respect. > I don't do music stuff, but all the responsible music types here with > experience with several machines say the Amiga has the _worst_ music > software among the major players. Perhaps one of the disadvantages of allowing too much glitz and hype and less on the cheap, utilitarian tool? -- George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {ihnp4|rutgers|allegra}!cbmvax!grr but no way officially representing arpa: out to lunch... Commodore, Engineering Department fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)