From: edmondse@woods.ulowell.edu
Subject: Death Becomes Amiga!!
Organization: University of Lowell
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 19:30:43 GMT

Greeting fellow Amiga Advocates,

I have been delaying posting my thoughts about the state of the
Amiga in the U.S. because I have been trying to remain optimistic
and not cave in to the mounting pressure from those people who do
not own Amigas; but I feel now is the time to speak.

Several friends have asked me recently to help them buy computers for
various tasks, i.e. small accounting business, fellow students, and friends
who have children entering grade school. I own two Amigas myself but I had
to tell them that they should definitely not consider this machine as, in
my opinion, it is dead. C= has got an excellent machine with no standard or
for that matter decent (I know many of you will disagree here) productivity
software. By this I mean a Lotus compatable spreadsheet (Don't tell me about
Advantage, Maxiplan4, etc... They are bug ridden junk.) 

The is no wp (That I am aware of.) that will allow students to put
 mathematical text or equations
in a document (except TeX which I think is excellent but not for the average
person). Myself I am using WP5.1 for DOS and am rather upset that they dropped
support for the Amiga line. They told me in a letter that C= was cooperative
with them but apparently not enough so that they could continue developement
of the Amiga version.

The bottom line is that without an Amiga version of the standard productivity
software available for the Mac and PC, (Read Lotus123, WP5.1, MSWord,
Mathematica, AutoCAD (DynaCADD being another exception), the Amiga and
C= will never be able to
sell a proprietary computer to anyone other than video and music professionals.
Even these markets cannot be sustained long without a serious challenge from
third party companies who support PC and Mac computers.

My sincere advice to C=, or any other third party software companies, is to
somehow get good quality standardized productivity software available for the 
AMIGA soon. I have personally been forced to recommend 386 machines to several
people. I really wanted to say "Yea go and check out the AMIGA its a great 
machine and it will run WP5.1 and Lotus, and that should allow you to do your
homework or business correspondence without being penalized for owning a
computer that runs a proprietary OS." By this I mean a person could buy an
Amiga and not worry if they need to take home work from school or the office.
Plus they have a great machine to play games on if time allows. The fact is
that the Amiga doesn't do the most basic jobs that people rely on a computer
for without isolating them with nonstandard low quality software. I know I am
going to be flamed for this article but I really think you must agree with me
on my basic premise -- The AMIGA will die a slow agonizing death unless good
standard spreadsheet and wordprocessing software packages become available
for it SOON!!!! 

I hope C= somehow understands the basic fact that noone will choose a computer
unless there is software available for it. Look at NeXT how come there are
versions of most major productivity software supporting this machine. Does
it sell better than the Amiga? I don't believe it does (Correct me here if I
am out in left field). The arguement that there must be X number of machines in
service before major software developers will port there products over just
doesn't wash here. C= must get off its *&*%$ and actively support developement
of software from the business world, or ---- GAME OVER ----.


Eric Edmonds
UMASS at Lowell
Dept of Nuclear Engineering









Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy