I haven’t been in the Amiga scene for quite some years now as I have long since left for the shores of planet BeOS. However I recently had the chance to re-enter the Amiga World at an Amiga show in the South-East of France when I went to meet a potential employer – after being “discovered” on OSNews! You’d think that a computer which hasn’t shipped in years would have a small dwindling community. If you thought that well, you’d be wrong. This show dwarfs the BeOS BeGeistert shows I go to in Germany. Yet, Begeistert is for all of Europe and held every 6 months, this was just one French Amiga show and they are held around Europe nearly every week.(Held on 7-8 September 2002, Tain l’Hermatige, France.)
The show was in a big hall and there were rows of tables which were filled with every Amiga / hardware combination imaginable – and some not. The original computers may have stopped production many years ago (the last batch of A1200s were sold for $35 a piece) but add on cards still exist and people have kept expanding their Amigas.
The show opened at 9:00 am and a small queue had formed even then. evidently Amiga owners are very keen. Some of them are also skint and slept in the main hall.
Many Amigas had been crammed into PC cases and retro-fitted with numerous fans pointing in every direction they could be pointed. It’s not possible to fit anything beyond a Hard Disc into an A1200 case so many had adaptors with a HD and CDROM sitting beside the computer without any casing.
Others had managed to shoehorn an Amiga motherboard into a PC case, someone somewhere is doing a good trade in case “wallpaper”, many cases had a very fetching marble effect.
Some Amigas had been positively mutilated to keep up with the times, this involved fitting CPU cards with an expansion slot into the A1200 expansion slot. This expansion slot itself had a further expansion card plugged into it and this had further PCI slots. I actually seen two of these abominations and yet they actually worked and were displaying graphics over a PCI graphics card.
68060 Accelerators were in abundance plugged into all shades of Amigas, Those old Amiga 2000’s must have never known what hit them. There were quite a few A4000’s yet I don’t remember seeing a single A3000 – which I did once see at Begeistert – go figure…
There was even a 17 year old Amiga A1000 showing things like the boing and juggler demos. Turned out it was for sale and one nostalgic ex-A1000 owner purchased it.
Amigas were not the only things on show though. Both Macs and shock horror Atari STs were present! At the Amigas height the Atari and Mac were despised enemies and generated un-endless mine is better than yours debates. This of course never happens between owners of different platforms on OSNews 😉
And there was more, anyone remember the Oric Atmos? There was one of those there as well along with a Polish “clone” and a pile of books and software packages – all on tape, those were the days… people complain about OSs taking seconds to boot up yet a single small application used to take 5 minutes to load from tape!
There were umpteen different games machines of different vintages but they appeared to be still working and all manner of games were being played. I’m not quite sure but at one point there even appeared to be Pong championship going on at the front on a big screen, I don’t think you can get any more retro than that.
Eyetech were present with an Amiga One housed in a very nice transparent case with neon lights. I didn’t see it running AmigaOS 4.0 but it was running Linux. There was a presentation given about the progress on Amiga OS 4.0 but I didn’t see it and given everything was usually in French I probably wouldn’t have understood it anyway! Mike Bouma will no doubt give us a full update when there’s any info.
The potential employer I was there too meet is Amiga incs’ competitor Thendic-France, they were exhibiting a new PowerPC based computer Pegasos as well as it’s Operating System MorphOS (It also runs Linux). It is very common in the industry to launch products on paper and never ship the real thing, This was the other way around, I’d never even heard of this system and yet there were a whole row of computers sitting working away.
The system was developed by bplan of Germany and the motherboard was more than a little impressive being very small and neatly laid out yet with very few components despite a back place stuffed with all manner of ports. In what must have been the ultimate act of geek-hood one betatester got his motherboard signed!
The CPU (Also used in some Amiga Ones) was a 600MHz IBM G3, it was running with only a small heatsink, some boards didn’t even have a heatsink yet when taken out of the machine the CPU wasn’t even warm. Try running any x86 at 600MHz without a heat sink and see how long before you have a dead CPU! IBM have obviously put some very serious engineering into making a chip of this speed run so cool.
The show was a fascinating re-introduction to todays Amiga scene which is alive and well despite having a market share of 0.0% for some years now, and some people complain about Apple.. Best of all though I got the job 🙂
…and as for the nostalgic no-longer-ex-A1000 owner – that was me 🙂
Good article!
Although: “this was just one French Amiga show and they are held around Europe nearly every week”
Hmmm.
For those wishing to research more on the Amiga or the
incompatible alternative MorphOS steer clear of
the comments sections where lots of zealouts hold flame
wars on news sites but the best ( in order ) are:
http://www.amiga-news.de
http://www.morphos-news.de
http://www.ann.lu
“small dwindling community”
It has a small dwindling community, probably less than a two
thousand world wide of which about 500 have any money. 😉
“The potential employer I was there too meet is Amiga incs’ competitor Thendic-France”
Too funny! So this is an unbiased review then?
MorphOS runs Amiga OS 3.x and down applications but not AmigaOS4.0 applications.
AmigaOS4.0 runs AmigaOS 3.x and down applications, AmigaOS4.0 applications but not MorphOS applications.
Its a vfork( ) in the road dude.
That was one of the best show reports I’ve seen for a long time.
There are a minority of people in the Amiga community who spend their
time throwing mud at each other in forums, but the people shown here
were just having a good time, which is what it should be about.
As for the “fork” – we have to see how it goes, but my bet is that
most programmers will want their software to run on as many Amiga-like
computers as possible. The only problem for programmers is the cost of
owning both an AmigaOne and a Pegasos, and possibly a PC with an
emulator too.
Mr. Anonymous,
FYI http://www.amiga.org has around double the amount of registered users (from last couple of months) than that.
Though Germany has probably the largest percentage of Amiga users and the Big Amiga fair http://www.amiga-messe.de gets thousands of visitors annually. Do you think every Amiga user out there attends this fair? No way! Many Italians for instance go to their 2 day Amiga Pianeta fair instead, Americans have their small shows themselves (2000 American Amiga users could be a good guess, as the Amiga has only been popular among the elite in this country, Bill van Dyke being among the most famous), thew same for the UK, Poland, French, etc.
My personal guess is even that a majority of Amiga users don’t even visit such shows! (At least most of the people I know)
That was an great news post you had there, I do enjoy reading things such as this. I myself have never owned an Amiga, but I do have times when I wish to dig out my older hardware and put it all togather and flip that switch on. I have seen a Amiga os of a sort that fasinated me, I am curious as to how thats going to go. Finally a person posting with a positive upbeat bit of info to read, its nice to take a break from all the mostly negative stories that are half off their rocker.
Well at least after 13 the 14th one is a good read.
Well done Nicholas, I enjoyed your report! Good to see you found a job at Thendic as well, I believe you will be a valuable addition (again) to the Amiga community.
@Asemoon
Registrants on Amiga.org does not mean they are unique, real people
or even remotely alive. I would not consider that to be a good source
of Amiga user numbers.
Amiga.org does an average job of reporting the news and its
forums are full of world politics and religious debates and
very uninformative.
I think 2000 active world wide is pretty good guess myself but
lets give it a range
2000-5000.
Tiny, and dwindling.
> Mike Bouma will no doubt give us a full update when there’s any info.
Well, for starters for those who had difficulty reading the AmigaOne/AmigaOS4 progress report picture, here’s what this progress report actually stated:
http://www.amiga.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1022
At the upcoming World of Amiga SE 2002 show to be held on the 2nd of November in the UK, Amiga Inc and Hyperion will be demonstrating AmigaOS4 and be selling Hyperion’s Quake2 PPC Amiga port.
http://www.worldofamiga.com/
Is that a prototype of Thendics Eclipsis (http://www.thendic-france.com/TECH/US/products/eclipsis/eclipsis.ht…) on one of those pictures?
@ Anonymous
The Polish Amiga magazine “Magazyn AMIGA” has around 8,000 subscribers. Surely I am not a member, considering I don’t even speak Polish, I speculate there are more Amiga users like me.
Re: Who is Bill Van Dyke?
Probably Dick van Dyke. He’s a famous actor and Amiga fan (Amiga Atlanta member?). He appeared with Amiga’s CEO Bill McEwen on CNN some time ago.
>The Polish Amiga magazine “Magazyn AMIGA” has around 8,000 subscribers.<
May I ask whether you got that information directly from the people running that magazine?
I’m asking because this would mean that Poland is now the world’s biggest Amiga market. If one combines sales of *both* remaining German Amiga magazines, you’d get a total number of subcriptions lower than 8,000 (by quite a bit)!
Reply to myself: No, it’s not.
Heloooooo,
humm:
http://blachford.info/computer/A-EXPO/pics5.html
I like the first photo ;-D
This amiga-users atitude is very good 🙂
Can you tell us what position you have undertaken at Thendic (or however you spell it) and what you could possibly be working on…
What parts of the OS and what not… just curious.
@ Andre
There’s a second Polish print magazine called “Amiga Computer Studio” as well. The Polish Amiga community is impressively large.
Regarding Germany, you miss one of the three major German Amiga magazines,
Amiga Future http://www.amigafuture.de/ , Amiga Magazin/PCGo http://www.amiga-magazin.de and AMIGAplus http://www.amigaplus.de
Note that these magazines are still being sold at shops, so subscription is not actually necessary (unlike for the Polish “Magazyn AMIGA”).
MorphOS runs Amiga OS 3.x and down applications but not AmigaOS4.0 applications.
—
Don’t forget MorphOS, WarpOS(including W3D) and PowerUp
apps!
> There’s a second Polish print magazine called “Amiga
> Computer Studio” as well. The Polish Amiga community is
> impressively large.
> Regarding Germany, you miss one of the three major German
> Amiga magazines,
> Amiga Future http://www.amigafuture.de/ , Amiga
> Magazin/PCGo http://www.amiga-magazin.de and AMIGAplus
> http://www.amigaplus.de
While I was once a regular reader of Amiga Magazin, I hardly regard it as a “full” magazine any more. It is now delivered as a small supplement to those subscribers of PC!go who once had a subscription of Amiga Magazin when it was still a stand-alone magazine.
(Please note that this is not meant as a form of disrespect for Mr. Burkert’s work. In fact, I think it’s great that Amiga Magazin is still alive.)
> Note that these magazines are still being sold at shops,
> so subscription is not actually necessary (unlike for the
> Polish “Magazyn AMIGA”).
Well, I don’t quite understand what you mean by “shops”. It’s true that there are a couple of Amiga dealers selling Amiga Plus and/or Amiga Future. But you cannot go to a regular newsstand and buy the latest issue of either magazine. (Same is true for Amiga Magazin, btw.)
After Amiga Future went subscription-only about two years ago, the largest German Amiga magazine, Amiga Plus, followed sometime around last year as far as I can remember.
Like I said, if it was true that Magazyn Amiga has 8,000 subscribers, that would be simply _amazing_. I must admit I remain sceptical about that number, though.
Considering that most Amiga users also own other platforms next to their Amiga (PCs in particular), I personally don’t think it was a bad idea to bundle Amiga Magazin together with PC readers material. A much larger audience can be reached this way (Many more newsstands will sell your magazine).
And with regard to other German Amiga magazines still being sold at ordinary shops, there are still quite a few to be found (even where I live, in Groningen/The Netherlands!).
> that would be simply _amazing
Although these numbers are a year old, yes it is!
I will send you some contact information if you would like to get the most up to date numbers.
@Mike
The PC-GO is an abslolute “DAU”-magazine for the computer-illeterate, and
the copies sold at newsstands do NOT include the Amiga-part.
>Considering that most Amiga users also own other platforms next to their Amiga (PCs in particular), I personally don’t think it was a bad idea to bundle Amiga Magazin together with PC readers material. A much larger audience can be reached this way (Many more newsstands will sell your magazine).<
Problem is, while it is perfectly possible to purchase “PC!go” at ordinary newsstands you *cannot* do the same with the special edition containing “Amiga Magazin”. Also, regular subscribers of “PC!go” don’t get the “Amiga” supplement either. You have to specificially subscribe for ‘Amiga Magazin’ in order to get a copy of PC!go” containing “Amiga Magazin” as an extra.
Seriously, this is not a good way to reach a larger audience at all. Is it?
>Although these numbers are a year old, yes it is!
I will send you some contact information if you would like to get the most up to date numbers.<
Yes, I would definetely want to get up-to-date numbers.
Although this is an unfair comparison even the Macintosh
numbers ( which has struggled ) has user numbers in the
multi-millions.
2000-5000 is probably a fair bet for the Amiga platform, how
many have left over the last 12 months of missed deadlines,
pointless flamewars and unfulfilled promises?
1 in 4?
1 in 3?
1 in 2?
Still, it has a plucky userbase and if something gets
released it will be adopted with a frenzy so expect to see
those numbers double and redouble very quickly although it
would probably take until MorphOS 2.0 to rival the user friendliness
of the Mac and start to rebuild the lost userbase.
@ Kronos
> The PC-GO is an abslolute “DAU”-magazine for the
> computer-illeterate,
The magazine targets a large audience. If it would target mainly the more literate (like Amiga Magazine did) the magazine probably wouldn’t sell in the hundreds of thousands. PC-GO looks similar to me as other PC Magazines.
@ Andre
> Seriously, this is not a good way to reach a larger
> audience at all. Is it?
I believe it was the best option for Amiga Magazine at the time.
> Yes, I would definetely want to get up-to-date numbers.
I will cc a couple of contacts in my email to you.
It’s good to see the Amiga word being spread around outside of it’s usual circles. The Amiga gets little publicity at all these days, and you’d be suprised at the amount of people who have completely forgotten it or remember it as a “game’s console” which of course it was not. Infactm in it’s day, it was a workstation that was way in advance of ANY of it’s competitors, and I still believe that only bad marketing on Commodore’s part actually caused the failiure of the Amiga, which was (is) a wonderful machine.
My Amiga 1200 has a PPC expansion board, a ZorroII board which runs a modern GFX card and the PPC card also has 64MB RAM. It has a 40GB HD, a CDRW, and it’s all housed inside a nice tower. Oh by the way, my Amiga is also what I’m using to surf the internet as we speak!!!
So yeah, it’s good to hear that at least SOME people are re-discovering the Amiga and realising the potential it always had. I look forward to the release of the AmigaOne and OS4 soon, which hopefully will secure the Amiga’s future as a powerful modern home computer.
Brian
> how many have left over the last 12 months of missed
> deadlines
I don’t think that much has changed this last year. Amiga users have been waiting for a new Amiga computer for nearly a decade (the last year has of course been bad for the entire tech sector). As long as there isn’t a suitable replacement people will continue to wait for something better.
Of course also MacOS X and WindowsXP are becoming better substitutes as well as more AmigaOS-like in terms of features (compared to the precessors during Amiga’s hey-days). However they are still too different in terms of modularity, architecture, structure and efficiency. IMO only MorphOS could potentially become a full AmigaOS substitute. However I believe most of the Amiga community prefer AmigaOS4.
> would probably take until MorphOS 2.0 to rival the user
> friendliness of the Mac
MorphOS has come a long way these last couple of years, with some maturing it will hopefully become as user friendly, *but* with a more efficient and compact design. MacOS X IMO just is to inefficient and bloated for my liking. However it is also expected that it will take until AmigaOS4.5 or AmigaOS5 that AmigaOS will be competitive with mainstream desktop OSes. Before MorphOS and AmigaOS4 are fully matured, these OSes will likely remain niche targeted.
@ Mike:
Alright, forget about my email… I have just been informed that there is *no* Amiga print magazine left in Poland. It looks like “eXec” is dead, too.
Well, I knew that number of yours was way too high…
On the other hand, I would have wished I was wrong.
Apparently “Magazyn AMIGA” has turned into “eXec” and it is still alive. (Sorry somehow forgot about that) More info: http://www.amiga.pl
> More info: http://www.amiga.pl
According to the original deputy in chief editor of “Magazyn Amiga”. Their homepage receives around 900 visitors a day, not a bad figure.
Also http://www.amiga.com.pl/ receives around 700 visitors and around 3000 pageviews a day.
For these facts alone, I do think that there must be a couple of thousand “active Amiga Users” in Poland alone. And that was the original point I was trying to make.
I believe the German Amiga market is bigger.
There are well documented reasons why “pageviews” and “visitor” numbers
to an single site is a bad way of mining data about product usage.
Let alone across multiple sites ( set intersections anyone? ) across multiple
days.
Let alone trying to include “site registrations”.
Let alone trying to make out that visitors to a site in a given
nation cannot be visited by international users.
My thumb in the air estimate is still as good as any 😉
> Let alone trying to make out that visitors to a site in
> a given nation cannot be visited by international users.
Considering that these websites are written in Polish I don’t think they receive many visitors who don’t understand the Polish language. If you want to make a “gestimate”, better base it on something.
“If you want to make a “gestimate”, better base it on something”
How about sales figures of a real product shipped in the last 9 months?
> How about sales figures of a real product shipped in the’
> last 9 months?
Yes, that would have been a better option for Mr. Anonymous, instead of just making a wild guess.
I know that over 1120 people have joined the “Amiga Team” for 50 USD/Euro these last couple of months. Note that this is only a small minority of the community though. But still an impressive number of the most determined AmigaOS supporters among the community.
@ Mike Bouma
All Polish Amiga magazines are dead since a few years
I think there are a lot of Amiga users out there you don’t think about. I run the Amiga web site GetBoinged.org http://www.getboinged.org and I was amazed of the different countries listed in the statistics of the site. We get between 40,000 and 50,000 hits a week. Which isn’t actual users, but it gives you an idea. Some of the countries every week are: Germany, UK, Netherlands, Ireland, Spain, France, Sweden, Australia, Canada, China. Plus many others that I have seen from time to time.
It really is amazing how many still enjoy the Amiga.
Jacek, after doing some more research, I know this now. ;( Only Exec is alive in Poland and even Exec is not being published as a CD-only magazine on a regular basis.
This is kind of sad as I am almost certain that the Polish Amiga community is larger than the Dutch Amiga Community, and even we still have our own print magazine called Amiga Scene. The same goes at least for the French, German, Danish, Italian, Spanish, British Amiga markets. I don’t know for certain about the rest of Scandinavia, but Amiga shows at least are still being well attended there.
It’s silly to argue about user numbers without deciding who counts as
a “user”.
1. people who only use the Amiga
2. people who mostly use the Amiga
3. people who sometimes use an Amiga (or AmigaOS)
4. people who occasionally use AmigaOS, eg for one particular program
5. people who no longer use AmigaOS but would be interested in buying
a new Amiga
All these are different numbers. The same would apply to BeOS.
Somebody mod Don Cox up to insightful.
I think a combined figure for point 1 to 4 and a seperate figure for point 5 is the most interesting to companies.
The C3 from VIA ( based off of crix?? not sure on the speling) can run with a heatsink and I think none too. Just to let you know
>Well done Nicholas, I enjoyed your report!
Thanks 🙂
>Is that a prototype of Thendics Eclipsis on one of
>those pictures?
As you correctly guessed, no. I don’t think you’ll have much luck finding a modern version of Windows to run on PPC. As for how I know this…
>Can you tell us what position you have undertaken
>at Thendic (or however you spell it) and what you
>could possibly be working on…
I’m the Project Manager on Eclipsis.
>Too funny! So this is an unbiased review then?
Well, I was at the show and thought since I’d seen such weird and wonderful stuff, I thought it might make an interesting article, It’s not really a review as such.
There is more about MorphOS and the Pegasos because I was there to meet them and learn about their stuff. There are more pictures of their stuff because I took some pics with Thendics camera but was given everything they took. The rest I found on-line.
nice report, I was there and it reflects well the real thing
I liked the comments under the photos
First I’m gonna say sorry for my poor english.
Second I’m gonna destroy some illusion:
a) The german Amiga market is small. Maybe 2000, maybe 5000. Who knows. Doesn’t make a big difference at all. Days are long time gone when cologne fairs were visited by 60.000 amiga users (1995)…
b) Many left during the last 5 years because of being p***ed off by stupid flames, not fulfilled promises and always changing release dates.
c) Lots of former amiga users (have to confess I’m one of them) are still watching the scene. Gone for now. Not gone forever. But it will be hard to convince them that amiga has any kind of future. Even if one new amiga model would be released (unlike past ~10 yrs), who would give them any warranty that the next one won’t take another decade? Hey sorry, but it’s not a world of dreamers!
d) Anyone to show me the market for new amiga models? except the retro market corner.
Games? PS2, XBOX, GameCube.
Applications? No serious office. Graphicians are appled.
So, what’s a new “Amiga” for?
Sorry but it doesn’t help anyone to live and drea on cloud nine…
So, what’s a new “Amiga” for?
This is the key question, for Amiga, the Pegasos, OpenBeOS and any other alt OS project underway. Any new machine that runs the old applications faster will be great for the current fans. But it will take more than that to attract new users. What can these OSs do that would give them an edge over Windows, MacOS or Linux? Especially if they involve a hardware purchase, they’ve got to have something really compelling.
Simply “no bloat” or “boots fast” isn’t enough; they have to be better at some significant task IMHO, to grow the userbase enough to hit economic viability. Creating this special capability and articulating it to the public is probably a greater challenge even than getting the product out the door initially.
— gary_c
As I have written in a recent article, I believe the first important niche markets to target, would be the professional graphic/video and music/audio markets. The Amiga still has a relatively good reputation here, a more efficient OS and better multitasking can mean a big benefit here.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1356
Similarly BeOS captured some momentum in the audio market. However AmigaOS is also well known for offering great 3D rendering, multimedia presentation, painting and CAD software.
@ Mike
There are no print magazines, but we still have few online
mags. On the Amiga Meeting 2001 in Lodz there was around 100 people.
amiga-pl @yahoogroups has 199 subscribers, amiga-devpl – 101.
And I know a lot of people that use an Amiga but are not
subscribed to any amiga related ml…
“Yes, that would have been a better option for Mr. Anonymous, instead of just making a wild guess.”
Mike you can’t help but come over all pompous when you get
into a debate can you? It would perhaps have been better for
you to have done the same rather than repeat circulation
figures from long defunct magazines.
Do you really think that all people that can read or translate Polish websites
live only in Poland???
” 1. people who only use the Amiga
2. people who mostly use the Amiga
3. people who sometimes use an Amiga (or AmigaOS)
4. people who occasionally use AmigaOS, eg for one particular program
5. people who no longer use AmigaOS but would be interested in buying
a new Amiga ”
Good list folks but what would be better would be:
1. people who own an Amiga and want to change to a PPC based Amiga and actually have the finances to do so.
2. people who no longer own an Amiga and want to return to an AmigaOS platform despite the fact that thare are no applications at the level of capability of their current platform and have the finances to do so
The rest are interesting for boosting up statistics of the Amiga userbase
but not for companies trying to size up the market.
Oh and substract from the figures got from 1 and 2 the number of
mouthy fanatics who when they don’t get what they want to try to
destroy your company in public.
Perhaps an exit poll on all Amiga shows would give us a better
idea:
q1. Do you own a system running AmigaOS at the moment?
q2. Do you have the finances required to upgrade to AmigaOS4.0?
q3. Do you actively purchase software or get what you can free?
q4. Did you lie on q2 to look good and really you don’t have the
readies but just want to pump up the figures on an exit poll?
etc…
>> “Yes, that would have been a better option for Mr.
>> Anonymous, instead of just making a wild guess.”
> Mike you can’t help but come over all pompous when you
> get into a debate can you?
Heh, I agreed with Mr. Anonymous here. What’s wrong with that?
Yes the AmigaOS market is small, but it will benefit nobody to pretend it is smaller than it actually is. I was only trying to point this out to Mr. Anonymous.
According to certain leading Polish Amiga community figures which I contacted yesterday, there are likely around 4000 active AmigaOS users in Poland. So combined with Germany, Scandinavia and the rest of the world, worldwide it still has a significant market. IMO that is the only reason why there still are quite a few companies and dealers supporting the platform.
> Do you really think that all people that can read or
> translate Polish websites live only in Poland???
Why would you want to translate Polish news websites, most people within the Amiga community can either speak English or German. For those who prefer other languages, there are specific Spanish, Dutch, French, Polish, Italian, etc languaged websites.
And let me reverse your question. Do you think that every AmigaOS user living in Poland speaks Polish or prefers a Polish languaged website?
Do you think all Polish AmigaOS users even use the internet?
“Do you think all Polish AmigaOS users even use the internet?”
So the three or so that don’t have access to the internet at home,
work, internet cafe or at school should be considered as
significant?
Can I ask you who these leading figures are and where they
get their statistics from? Finger in the air or something
useful like say sales of Descent Freespace….
> should be considered as significant?
I know some Amiga users in the Netherlands who seldom or don’t visit Amiga *websites* at all. Although I agree that the people without internet access are a minority, I don’t think one can speak of “all AmigaOS users”.
> Can I ask you who these leading figures are and where
> they get their statistics from?
Polish Amiga Webmasters and eXec editors.
> Finger in the air or something useful like say sales of
> Descent Freespace….
Hyperion’s Amiga software titles outsell their Linux counterparts. And more commercial games are being developed/planned for AmigaOS4 and MorphOS than for Linux. Does this mean the Amiga community is larger than the Linux community?
“Does this mean the Amiga community is larger than the Linux community?”
The part of the community that is willing to part with
money for that particular product is larger.
And this is the key point, in order to attract commercial
products to a market sector you have to come up with the
figures of those that have in the past, are likely to now
and might need a bit of marketing to encourage them to part
with readies for those goods.
The Descent comparison gives us an indication of the numbers whom will part for an old game of that classification on the platform as it stands vs the x86 Linux user.
The Linux user is also complicated by the fact that many
already have it on their Windows partition and cannot cope
with the thought they might actually have to part with money
for a different version running on a different operating system but shock horror on the same box.
Lets face it, the Linux market is distorted in the “low end user” section that would use it to play games by those that
cannot be bothered to pay for software in the first place.
Whoops there goes a flamewar!
Unless someone commissions a proper survey and subjects that to statistical analysis to make corrections for lame
idiots that do not want to fill in the truth, all we can do
is guess and counter guess. If you guess, guess on the low side.
So, 2000-5000 still sounds realistic of which what about half would part with any money for new products.
How many users ? Don’t know, but I do know that KDH stopped stocking
the AmigaPlus due to low demand ….
Both AmigaPlus and AmigaFuture may combine to ~1000 unique subscribers, and
that also includes austrian, swiss and a few dutch/belgians.
I don’t know the exact figures myself, but I believe Amiga Magazine was (is?) the most popular German Amiga magazine. At least I liked that magazine the most. However I believe only a small minority of Amiga users are subribed to Amiga magazines. (There wasn’t that much to report for a couple of years)
However, for example the only BeOS magazine (German+English), “Inside BeOS”, at least that I know of, sadly never sold in significant numbers, but insiders do claim that BeOS once had around 100,000 users worldwide. So IMO relatively *low* magazine sales figures don’t have to mean much.
I will say straight off that I never had an Amiga, though I knew people who did. I thought it to be an interesting machine even though it had many flaws. I remember people who were developers for the machine saying that it was unstable.
Be that as it may, it enjoyed sales success when Commadore started to advertise heavily on tv (here in the States). They were very successful Ads. They featured astronauts and scientists going to visit this young teenage boy to solve problems for them on his Amiga.
When they stopped the Ads, the sales dropped like a stone.
The Toaster and Lightwave were the only true commercial products out there that were in daily, well publicised use. They are long gone on the Amiga.
I go to Amiga websites, and bought Amiga mags when I could find them, just as I do for the Atari St, of which I had two. I also bought the BEOS and programs for it when it was running on Macs.
I know of others like me. But it does not mean that we will BUY an Amiga, Atari ST, ot BEOS machine should a new one ever arrive. It just means that we are interested in the older machines out of nostalgia. I am sure that a good number of viewers to the Amiga websites, and buyers of the magazines are of the same opinion.
Apple sells almost four million machines a year, but finds it difficult to hold on to developers outside of graphics, video, and publishing, though Microsoft does have Explorer, outlook, and Office for it.
The reason that no new machines have come out is because despite the positive words from these companies, they know that there is simply no market. A few thousand, even a few tens of thousands of total users is not nearly enough to commit to serious R&D and a factory production line. I’m familiar with that senario because I was a partner in an audio manufacturing concern, until we sold it.
Software developers, as well, want to know that there is a continuing sale of product, year after year, not just upgrades to the same people. Amiga software these days is really “shareware-in-a-box”, not truely commercial product.
The arguments here seem to revolve around a few thousand readers, more or less. If that is the total of the INTERESTED ones, then the rest don’t even care that much.
While it must be fun to be iconoclastic by using something that no one else is interested in, the truth is that these old systems will never make a comeback. In the last few years of hope, when the Amige was bouncing around from company to company, no real product ever showed up. Unfortunatly for those who do want one, I’m afraid that it will never show up. And even if somehow it did, no competitive software will be ported over to it. Like the BEOS, software from well known companies have to be on the platform, otherwise it dosen’t matter to most people.
We will not see audio and video people flock over to the Amiga, even if a dual IBM 970 model with two gigs of RAM, a Radeon 9700 video board, Firewire, etc. was to come out. Who is going to write the competitive version to Final Cut Pro, or Avids Express?
I could go on, but you get the idea. It maybe is sad that many worthy systems can’t all be successful, but the coming of the IBM Pc ended that era.
melgross, there still are dozens of Amiga supporting companies and the products which are released are mostly of excellent commercial quality.
I truly would advise you to view this video coverage of last years mean Amiga event, and you will see that high quality Amiga products do exist.
http://www.virtualdimension.de/inscene/amiga2001/indexe.html
Also by stating new products will fail before they are actually released, is IMO very premature. IMO you should see the current Amiga community interest as a valuable headstart for a new product, not a limitation for future success.
Sorry it took so long for me to get back.
What I am saying is that the time for a “new” operating system and hardware is most likely past. You are not looking at the numbers. They are all that matters.
Even if Amiga sold 100,000 thousand computers a year, it would not be enough for the major software companies to be interested.
It doesn’t matter that dozens of supporting companies are around. There are thousands around for the Mac and Pc.
The point is that “Joe Shmo’s Photo Editor” is not going to excite the pro’s in the field. I would not abandon my Macs, in which I have invested thousands of dollars for software, and thousands more for hardware, to buy an Amiga, in which there is no high level of support from the software and hardware companies.
Apple spends over $100,000,000 a year on System software research and development. Microsoft spends several times that. These systems, whether you like them or not, are very complex because they must work in complex enviornments.
BEOS failed because they threw a party and no one came. The same thing will be true of the Amiga.
Even if all current and past Amiga users would want to buy a new one, how many would that be, and how many of those folks could afford a new computer setup and new software?
If you could talk Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, Oracle, and other large vendors of “standard” software to port their programs over, and had a couple of unique killer apps, then maybe…
Unfortunatly, a headstart is not enough these days. Adobe just let hundreds of people go. Other software companies are in the same, or worse, boat. They are not about to start to spend money on porting software over to a computer system on which they don’t know will be sucessful. Microsoft, a couple of months or so ago, complained that they had ONLY sold 300,000 copies of Office X to Mac users when they expected to sell 750,000. Can they sell that many to the Amiga community? Can anyone sell a large number of $450 programs to the Amiga community. How many programs in that price catagory would YOU buy? Every year?
There ARE some nice programs out for the Amiga, but they don’t compete on the level that is needed for a platform to become competitive. You NEED the big guns.
This may be sad, and hard to take, but there you have it. When Apple is fighting for it’s life, and it has sixr billion in sales, and four billion, three hundred million in the bank, with no real debt load. And it’s said that they may not make it, how can the Amiga, or any other system like it make a comeback?
I suppose as a very small volumn, speciality boutique system it could. But don’t expect much from it. Basicly puttering around, and stating proudly that you’re actually on the internet now with it, is not very encouraging.
But, who knows?
Melgross, I believe the Amiga community is just far too stubborn to just give themselves won. We see so many design flaws in MacOS X and WindowsXP, that we just have to try to show the world how things can be done differently.
Many people say, “yes are OSes are far too bloated and inefficient, but memory is cheap nowadays”, although true it is also like running a very large application in the background and therefor will severely hurt the performance of other software running while adding enormous loading times.
There have been many desigh flaws in the Amiga OS as well. The more complex the design, the more flaws will be present. If the Amiga OS was ever brought up to the standards of the Mac and Pc, then it too would be bloated and slow.
I wish you well, but it is out of the hands of the Amiga “community”, it is in the hands of businessmen who will be concerned about the small detail of making a profit, and staying in business.
The facts cannot be ignored. the many “classic” computer systems of the past are fondly remembered by their users, but forgotton by everyone else. This is as it should be. We cannot look to the past for anything more than inspiration for the present.
The only way I can see the Amiga as having a chance is if it were rewritten to run on xx86 boxes. There is nothing that the Amiga did that other systems don’t do today. Therefore a video card with NTSC output would suffice for the video bit , and a decent sound card would suffice for the audio. If the operating system would work on that, then the rest of it’s features would work as well. This way all that most people would have to do would be to purchase the OS and maybe an inexpensive board or two. I don’t think any other solution could work. It’s too expensive to design a computer from scratch these days. Custom chips such as memory controllers cost millions to design and test. These chips cost more than $100 in quantities of ten thousand. That means at least $200-$300 in the final product, without adding the cost for that R&D. Custom video controllers? Ask Nvidia or ATI.