From: nwickham@nyx.cs.du.edu (Neal Wickham)
Subject: Re: Utilities Unlimited vs NewTek's cottage industry paradigm
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Date: Tue, 15 Sep 92 22:43:04 GMT

In article <1686389AF.SBACIR2@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu> SBACIR2@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu writes:

>  Consider Amiga vs Mac vs IBM market sizes.  It would take a very unusual
>creative person to want to develop for the Amiga.  The market share is so
>small.


You cut out the part where I mentioned the NewTek could have developed new
markets.  In fact, NewTek did develop new markets but could have done much
more.

And actually, the total number of Amigas out there is about the same as
Macs worldwide. ...though more Amigas are low-end 500s.  But NewTek 
could have made a Toaster Jr. for them and didn't.  And Emplant is 
going to have a 500 version and probably a 600 version.


>For the same amount of effort a very creative person can develop
>a MAC or IBM product which will provide much more monetary return than an
>Amiga product.


Not true.  I was told that NewTek looked into a Mac version but the cost
of the additional hardware was something like $2000 which is more than the
Amiga 2000 itself.

And Mac is just a whole other ball of wax where so much of the cost of
the Mac covers marketing and support.  It is a different sort of market.
My roomate was a retail Mac salesman and is now a Mac salesman for one
of the biggest computer distibutors (sells to stores and businesses) in
the West.

Amiga 4000 owners are going to be able to emulate Mac at Quadra speeds
for ci cost. 


>Just look at the Mac and IBM magazines.  One of their mags
>has more ads than you see in AW and AC for an entire year - that's market
>power.


I do.  My roomate has subscriptions to about every Mac magazine on the
market and several PC or Windows magazines.  Mac people have the Mac
paradigm, PC people have the PC paradigm, and Amiga people have the
Amiga paradigm.  I am just saying that we all have these paradigms and
if you don't watch out, they can keep you in a rut or prevent you from
doing some very wonderfull things.  I've heard for example that we
could have bicycle seats which are much more eronomic but that bicycle
seats evolved from horse saddles with little thought to comfort so
people have worn blisters on their butts due to the saddle paradigm
for bicycle seats.  :)  There are some better examples I can't think
of right now.   



>  If you look at WordPerfect Corporation's decision to leave the Amiga
>market, you see this demonstrated.  If the market existed WP would have
>upgraded WP 4.1 to outperform Final Copy or ProWrite in GUI.  As it is
>it outperforms them and the others in everything but GUI.


WP didn't release 5.1 or whatever it was because there are not enough
Amiga's powerfull enough to run it.  That will change with these cheap
040 Amigas.  They already had the port to 2.0.  Amiga is not a business
computer partly because of the history of the display and partly 
because of the Amiga paradigm.  I personally don't care that it is not
a business machine;  but I would like to see it excell at Multimedia
and DTV.



                                     NCW

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy