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From: denbeste@bbn.com (Steven Den Beste)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Desktop publishing (was "Re: Jerry declares" and so on)
Message-ID: <37074@bbn.COM>
Date: 10 Mar 89 14:15:23 GMT
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: denbeste@BBN.COM (Steven Den Beste)
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 43

Dave Scroggins writes:
"...I really do not understand why the AMIGA has not yet been used to do decent
Desktop Publishing. It seems to me as though the required hardware is there or
available, but the software to do it is a joke."

Does everyone know what "deadly embrace" is? The world of computer marketing is
plagued by it. In this case, it goes like this:

Customers don't see the Amiga as a vehicle for Desktop Publishing, since there
is no good software to do it. Therefore, the big publishers don't think the
customer base is present to justify development of such a product. Therefore
the Customers don't see any software, so they don't see the Amiga as a vehicle
for Desktop...  sigh.

It's not just this one case, EVERY aspect of a new computer is treated this
way. There will be certain products for which the existence of the computer
creates a known demand: compilers, editors, graphics editors on a graphics
machine. But for everything else you get deadly embrace.

It gets broken one of two ways:
1. A small company breaks the ice with a reasonably good product and makes
loads of bucks from it. There is now a proved customer base, and all the big
companies jump in. [So far as I know, the only Amiga area fitting this scenario
is games.]
2. Some big company decides to take a chance. [I know of no such case with the
Amiga.]

Other than that, support mainly comes from small companies like ASDG who don't
need as big a sales volume to survive.

The only way I've heard to bypass this deadlock is for the manufacturer of the
new machine to guarantee large sales. For the PC, IBM could do this just by
being IBM. Everyone knew that the PC would sell big, so no-one was afraid of
it. For the Mac, Apple did it for certain programs by distributing them with
the Mac. Commodore isn't big enough to do like IBM, nor has it the financial
resources to do what Apple did.

So we'll just have to limp along with the small suppliers for a couple more
years. And, you know what? In some ways I think we're better off for it.
The small suppliers listen to us.

Steven C. Den Beste,   BBN Communications Corp., Cambridge MA
denbeste@bbn.com(ARPA/CSNET/UUCP)    harvard!bbn.com!denbeste(UUCP)