From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: What does the Amiga lack?
Date: 23 Jul 92 19:25:01 GMT
Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA

In article <1992Jul18.081650.11781@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett) writes:

>>ohh... do you all think a small company such as Softwood or New Horizons
>>can provide some of the programs mentioned above?  They seem to be 
>>pretty keen on releasing stuff for the Amiga.

>   I think companies like Softwood, New Horizons, and Gold Disk are being 
>pressed too much already.  

That's certainly somewhat true.  Lots of the Amiga companies, not unlike lots of
those programming for other platforms, tend to be specialists in certain 
categories of software.  The largest market for software on any machine, other
than niche stuff (eg, video/graphics on the Amiga), is the kind of thing 
everyone using the system as a general purpose machine needs.  That's WP, DTP,
SpreadSheet, Utilities, and a few others.  These are certainly represented by 
several Amiga publishers.  What you don't necessarily get are the more 
specialized programs.  While a specialized program may not sell that many
copies, it's the kind of thing that if you need it, you need it bad.  Computer
platforms are often sold on the basis of the specialty programs available.
Most of us want a general purpose computer for our homes or office desktops.
But in the lab I have a PAL programming station that happens to be based on a
PClone, since all the best PAL goodies available run under MS-DOS, and rarely
elsewhere.  I also have a Logic Analyzer, the Biomation CLAS-4000, which uses
a Mac for a display.  The Biomation program only runs on Macs, something like
the Toaster arrangement with Amiga (though in reality, all you need is SCSI
to support the Biomation box).

>The Mac has such a wide variety of software because it has more software 
>developers.  

That's true.  In may if not most cases, you'll find that specialty programs for
the Mac are also on the PC, though the converse is not true.  Market size is a
big, big factor in the choice of a platform for any specialty program.  If you
don't need any special feature of a machine and your specialty program isn't
unique enough to drive sales of your favorite machine, you probably have to 
release an MS-DOS version of the program.

>    LabVIEW II appears to be some kind of package that allows one to
>design data acquisition and instrument control programs.  From the 
>description of it in the ad, it seems to be some kind of super-enhanced 
>AmigaVision oriented toward making manufacturing, production, and
>intrumentation control programs.

LabView is pretty cool (and its also available for MS-DOS).  We don't use it 
here, but I read about quite some time ago in an article on graphical
programming (either BYTE or Dr. Dobbs, I don't recall which).  This system
provides software versions of gauges, buttons, graphs, etc. that you normally
find around a lab, and ways to hook them together into a data aquisition 
system.  It's pretty specialized, but I imagine it would be fun to hack in.
It's in some ways the same idea as AmigaVision, but oriented toward lab work
rather than presentation authoring.  The idea is that anyone can assemble 
such an application, and rather quickly -- you don't need a programmer (though
I think anyone involved in the design of hardware systems should be a
programmer too, just so they don't make software interface mistakes).


-- 
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      BIX: hazy
	"Work like a horse, drink like a fish"	- Psychefunkapus