From: plouff@kali.enet.dec.com (Wes Plouff)
Subject: Re: Obituary [Amiga's] in Silicon Valley newspaper
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 17:05:58 GMT


The San Jose article also appeared in the Boston _Globe_.

Some good perspective on all this can be found in _Accidental Empires_,
by Robert X. Cringeley.  "Cringeley" is _InfoWorld_'s gossip columnist,
and much of the book is full of stories about Bill Gates' personal
hygiene.  Cringeley's hypothesis is that many of the leading players in
personal computers got there by being first and being lucky.

But several of his points are spot on.  The semiconductor industry, and
thus the personal computer industry, has an expectation of continually
falling prices.  Desktop computer product lines are now expected to
change every 18 months.  In this light, the new Apple models from last
year make a lot of sense, and Commodore's slowness in bringing out new
models does not.  The A600 does make tremendous sense.

Cringeley mentions the Amiga, along with the Atari St, in a single
sentence.  He thinks they are technically good machines, but in any
market there is room for at most two "standards," with a roughly 85-15
split in market share.  This goes a long way toward explaining why most
people think that "real" PCs are either MS-DOS/Windows or Macintosh, and
why they think that things like multitasking and peripheral drivers are
big deals.  It's not that Commodore has done anything wrong, it's just
that for most of the public there is simply no knowledge of the Amiga
and its capabilities.

This "two standard" thing explains somewhat why Amiga has been much
more successful in Europe than Macintosh.  It explains a lot about Sun
and its competitors.

I think that if Commodore is to recapture any great share of the
American market, it needs not only much-improved hardware, like Mac LC
plus graphics accelerator as a minimum, but also what Cringeley calls a
"compelling application."  This is software so empowering, so attractive
that it sells the computer by itself.  I thought that the Video Toaster
might be Amiga's compelling application, but it has only brought
dominance in the desktop video niche.

A last point in the book: Microsoft has a goal to be ubiquitous. 
Microsoft is not about leading-edge software, product excellence, or
even product quality.  Gates wants his software to be on every computer,
to control every software market he's in, to be first, which is why
early Microsoft offerings in a new area look so lame.

Windows NT? Maybe a start at a paradigm shift, maybe what MS-DOS should
have been years ago.  Definitely surrounded by hype.

Get the book; it's worth reading for the nuggets to be found inside.

In my opinion, these reports of Amiga's "death" are premature, but it's
abundantly clear every day that technical excellence has little to do
with market success in personal computers.  None of this brouhaha stops
me from enjoying my machine, though.

-- 
Wes Plouff, Digital Equipment Corp, Maynard, Mass.
plouff@kali.enet.dec.com

Prodigy tried to replace one of my spreadsheet files with the cookie
recipe, but the virus in my laser printer stopped it.  -- James Davies