From: leavitt@cheshire.oxy.edu (Thomas VanNess Leavitt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Amiga 4000/Atari Falcon
Date: 30 Jul 92 19:34:53 GMT
Organization: Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041 USA.

While this is somewhat depressing to think about, I've been reading and
thinking for quite a while... 

The experts say that the trend in the computer field is away from 
general productivity platforms towards specific apllications....

Let's look at the market... on the PC end of it, it seems like it is
segmented enough that you can purchase specific peripherials which enhance
whatever aspect of the machine (storage, computing power, sound, video,
software, etc) to a really high performance level, and purchase other
peripherials of adequate performance that allow you to concentrate on your
own application/use of the machine.  Integrating all the various high
end options into one machine is prohibitively expensive, and few users 
would actually take advantage... and they know this, so they don't purchase
these type of machines generally.

O.K., so I've sort of established a trend... let's take CBM's recent
response to Phillip Robinson... they seem to be positioning themselves as
a specific niche market solution, not a general purpose machine.  Four
areas where they have some reasonable market share.  If they can position
their machine as a cost effective solution in various segments, there is
no reason they can't survive...

 since then they're not competing against
every person developing peripherials/software for the PC market as a whole,
and segmenting their machines to produce better price/performance ratios
in specific application areas, but just a few... considering that there
are probably half a dozen or more clone makers (non-IBM, PC producing
companies) with sales in the $500 million annually plus range, and tons
more $10 to $100 million companies targeting specific application areas
(i.e. floor level industrial strength rackmount PCs--is anyone going to
contend that CBM should be marketing, competing there?  Why not... the
people working in those areas probably would like just as much to have
their work be running Amigas, instead of PCs, as any other area), it only
makes sense...

 if CBM had seen fit to license clones, so that the machine
could be segmented, we might be living in a different world.  But then
again, face it... the Amiga is an integrated solution, you can't 
reduce it's essence to a CPU... you can't strip off the sounds for a
specific segment, to reduce costs... you can't strip off the I/O for
a LAN, you can't piece it together willly nilly. 

Now lets look at the Falcon... with both SCSI-2 and IDE, it seems to
be targeted at two markets... the DSP capabilities enhancing both:
low end entertainment/music console, and high end music/dtp market...
IDE for the low end storage, DSP for awesome games/sound... SCSI-2
for mass storage and high level SCSI bus workings, probably 
necessary for music peripherials (also, we should not that since SCSI
is a bus, and most music peripherials are not likely to be able to
fit in any reasonably marketable case, and need all sort of odd connections,
that the 1040 type case only makes sense).  It is an integrated solution,
produceable at a lower cost than any other machine of it's type, because
of the architecture.

Think about it...

Thom