Amiga Watch: Tech Head Commentary On The Amiga Scene
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Hello Everyone and welcome to Tech Head Story's Amiga Watch page.

Like everywhere else, the Y2K Rollover has come and gone in Saratoga Springs, my home in upstate New York. Here I sit in the Uncommon Ground, a great coffee house, listening on their sound system to Chubby Checker belting out the "Twist". Analog music is great. Whoever programs the music here is pretty eclectic. One day its country, the next its Charley Parker and some serious bebop, after that its acid jazz with Count Basic coming through loud and clear. Today though, the scene is dominated by full blown boomer retro-rock of the sixties. I love it. I've been hearing the Temptations, Cream, Martha and the Vandellas, Steppenwolf, and more. The coffee is great, the scene is cool; in a word the perfect place to to write this communiquÈ.

I peck away at my Osaris palmtop. Its an EPOC32 Psion 5mx clone sold by Oregon Scientific. With 16 meg, I'm packin heat in my pocket. Its an example of an alternate operating system to Windoze bloatware. It boots in the blink of an eye. I can power down within an app and power up later exactly where I left off, inside my application, with my data there and ready to go. Remind you of any other machine?

Being here, listening to the music, really puts into perspective the troubled Amiga scene. If Amiga The Business, whoever the owners, crashes tomorrow, my Chuck Berry records are still going to play. After all the Stones were 12x5 before the world was 24/7. "Hello Little School Girl" still spins. Brian Eno will still be cool. So will James Brown. So will Miles Davis. James Ellroy will still write noir novels. George Lucas will still make films. And so will I for that matter.

Attitude adjustment.

In this frame of mind the music takes on added significance. Ah, there's Cream....

"I've been waiting so long," da da duh, (that's the guitar part) "to be where I'm going," da da duh, (more guitar) "In the sunshine of your love..."

I don't think Eric Clapton had the same idea about the lyrics as I do. But that "I've been waiting so long" lyric just about sums up my feelings about the Amiga biz scene. I think Cream had something, shall we say, more earthy in mind.

Has everybody read the Amino guy's missives yet? Good riddance to the lameo Commodore, Escom, Viscorp, Gateway techno-suits trying to act heroic and rally Amigans. Is it me or do you see it too, there seems to be a basic conflict between being in a corporation and trying to be heroic? Heroism is the truth of the developer garage and the artist's studio, not the corporate campus. Haven't you gotten a bit tired of interchangeable guys in suits pontificating about that of which they know little? I know I have. How about you?

This soulless suit stuff has got me thinking. When Detroit was the center of the American economy, amazing music came out of the Motor City. That's why they called it Motown. But now that Silicon Valley is the center of the American economy, no music of any kind comes out of that place. Silitown? That tells you something, doesn't it.

Back in the Uncommon Ground, Steppenwolf is on "With Magic Carpet Ride"; that's where Amino may take us. Then its Martha and the Vandellas with "Nowhere To Run"; that's where AmigaInc. was taking us. Then "I'm Standing in the Shadows of Love" with the Temptations, "preparing for the heartaches to come." Amino again? Well you get the idea, after that end of summer Schmidt-o-gram, all tunes take on an Amiga meaning.

Its very clear to me that all the Amiga community meant to the boys in San Diego was cannon fodder. They were hoping for an army of Amigan evangelists to fan out and by their efforts create an upward spike in the AmigaInc. sales charts for the Operating Environment rollout, or whatever vaporware they were pushing. The thing Gateway/AmigaInc. seemed to have forgotten about was that evangelism is a two way street. The evangelist has to get something out of the relationship too.

We got nothing.

"Long Time Gone" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young is starting to play. So now that there's a parting of the ways, let Gateway earn their Internet Information Appliance customers the old fashioned way, one customer at a time. Let's see how good they are. Frankly I don't think they are all that good.

Why?

A tin ear in public relations often precedes a marketing failure. Compare how well the Handspring PR-created buzz translated into killer palmtop sales for them with how badly AmigaInc. has botched their PR. BTW the Visor rocks. Check it out.

Sitting here in the Uncommon Ground, I notice that nobody is exactly knocking down this old Tech Head's door to provide input in the current Amiga/Amino situation. But what the hell, I'll do it anyway. Here goes...

For starters I'm not sure what to call Bill and Fleecy's excellent adventure. Let's see they got the four dwarves -- Amiga, Amino, Aqua, and Phoenix. Hmmmm... Well let's use all the terms until they clarify things. The Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix idea is a good one. A subculture, a community like the Amiga users, has a right to defend itself particularly when faced with its own extinction.

What is exciting here is a group of leading Amiga developers of the past and present have come together to try and turn things around with The Phoenix Platform Consortium. We haven't heard a lot, true, but this group is a pantheon of Amiga brains and creativity. Taken as a whole they represent what is so very right with Amiga.

The concept they're floating -- a computer platform with deep roots in its user community is a terrific one. There is really nothing like that around. Linux? Not really because some of the Amiga inmates took over the asylum -- a commercial firm. To find something comparable one has to look outside of computing and look at credit union members, Star Trek fans of the 60s, or Harley Davidson hog (motorcycle) owners. Its about time that the concept of users and developers taking joint responsibility for their computing fate has arrived.

If any of Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix pistoleros had asked my opinion on strategic considerations regarding their business plan, the inconvenient fact being that they didn't, here's what I would have told the AAAP flock.

Twenty things to think about while flapping your wings (instead of your gums):

1. Don't reinvent Amiga hardware using a design that is a straight line extrapolation from the last Commodore boxes. That's a sure-fire set-up for being blindsided by innovation. For instance plan now for multi gigahertz cpu clock rates. They will be here in a few years, about the time something new is ready to ship from Amino.

AmigaInc. got at least one thing right, there is a computer revolution on the way. They had enough sense to see it coming but not enough sense to understand it. The CEO of Sun, Scott McNealy isn't just blowing air when he said the network is the computer back in 1986. As a matter of fact check out Netwar2000 on Tech Head. Besides George Lucas, Linus Torvalds, and Bill Gates, I have McNealy talking about the current Java vision. (Too bad there isn't an Amiga Virtual Machine to run an Emblaze streaming video on Amiga desktops. That's what I used, Emblaze, to create this streaming video. I will be putting up a text version later in the month.) The Hyper-Net is an important element in the next stage of computing development. How far can the Aqua concept, formerly Kosh concept, of Object Ocean be pushed? Of course Java and Jini are already there. Can Aqua surpass it? It would be interesting to try.

You know, this phenomenon of seeing it but not getting it, was a recurring phenomenon among Commodore/Gateway/Amiga corporate managers. Commodore saw the CD-Rom player wave coming. But how did they execute? With CDTV and CD-32, which were duds. It wasn't good really. So like Yogi Berra put it, "Deja Vue all over again". AI '99 equaled Commodore '94; Different players same team. Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix are going to have enough problems as it is without repeating the ones that Commodore and Gateway have already made. Make different mistakes.

2. Implement a Snappy strategy. Along with continuing Amiga development, sell something compelling, cheap, and fast to develop. Consider what Play Inc. did. While this bunch of Newtek refusniks were laying the groundwork for Trinity, they were shipping Snappy. Now Snappy was Digiview in Wintel clothing. It evolved on the Amiga and was ported to Wintel. It was a smash hit. Play must have raked in the dough on that one. Snappy profits surely helped fuel Trinity development with a lot less trips to the venture capital well. Clearly the strategy was a good one because Play repeated it with the release of Gizmo98. Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix need something like this.

3. Forget about $2100 price points. With Dreamcast and Neuon chip enabled boxes nipping at your heels, those high margin days are over. With the Amiga community draining away, all assumptions are reset to zero. Gameboys are going beyond 32bit to 64 bit and Nintendo is developing Net interconnectivity through a cel-phone connection. I'm not kidding. Manufacturer greed with 40%-60% margins will drive the Amino venture right into a trainwreck. Amigans aren't dumb and they monitor their computing environments. In the networked world of the Net, the real market is the aftermarket. Get with it and assimilate this concept. Think value added. Upgrades and add-ons are at the center of the e-commerce business model, not taking a big chunk of money up front. Can you say Visor? Don't make hardware so expensive that potential users think twice, maybe ten times, before buying. Because...

Here's what you are up against...

Steve Jobs pointed out that it takes at least the perception of 400% added value to persuade a computer user to jump to a different platform. This is important because Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix need to get way beyond the barely 100,000 active Amiga users worldwide in order to survive, let alone flourish. The desktop Wintel box is a commodity. True, its bloated, clunky, and crash prone, but there's a lot of good work can be done on that platform. That's persuasive, a lot of perception to overcome. The $500 Wintel computer is here now and the $200 information appliance is on the horizon closing fast. Check out Stinger from Be as implemented by Qubit. Is Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix leading a parade or playing in traffic?

Here's a nice little Amino threat. The BE OS will run on that Intel/AMD/Cyrix commodity box. Don't forget there is a UAE for BE, well sort of. Regarding Aqua, there has to be a $499 price point or below, in the reference platform standards. It isn't an option. Do you really think that Transmeta's only hope was to be running inside the AI MCC?

Not.

There will be other cheap computers for it to run in. Along with many other cool cpus, I might add.

4. Whatever the way forward, backward compatibility through emulation is a must. There is too much good Amiga stuff, both apps and data that people are using to do creative work. In the age of the 1 gigahertz cpu, emulation is more of an option. I think I will be running UAE on a cpu with a 1 gig clock rate by this time next year. It would be nice if it were in an Aqua. Andrew Grove (a founder and former CEO of Intel) publicly stated that the Intel cpu of 2010, only a decade away at this point, will be running at, at least 11 gigahertz. That's what is coming. Don't you think an 11 gighz chip can make UAE run pretty good?

5. Make even the $499 Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix upgradeable. Every machine should be able to upgrade to a faster cpu and have the ability to take at least 2 cpus. It becomes an element in the 400% added value to make people jump platforms. Wouldn't it be great to have one cpu running UAE with say PPaint on top, while on the other cpu an amazing new Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix app is churning away. What if both programs interacted with eachother through Rebol? Value added.

6. Make all hardware upgrades truly plug and play. The Amiga's dirty secret has been there have been irq settings, arcane clips to attach, various software settings to tweak, nasty hardware hacks, and conflicts between hardware elements. The whole graphics issue, often with the need for dual monitors to truly run everything, has been problematic to say the least. Sometimes there really has been no difference between the Amiga and Wintel worlds at the hardware installation level. This has got to stop.

Can you say USB?

Three cheers for the TigerTronics guy and his ZorroII USB card. What will Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix do to get the USB software situation viable?

7. The inflated prices for graphics cards, accelerators, and other basic I/O technology is another beef. To be blunt Amigans pay far too much for basic I/O, like parallel, serial, or SCSI ports. Look over the other side of the hill at the Wintel camp. ATI makes Xtreme. Its a graphics card with 32 meg on board, its 128 bit, and eats DVD playbacks for lunch. Oh and by the way there's a $99 list price.

8. Participate in cross platform standards. Java, Real Audio and Video come immediately to mind. There will certainly be others in the years to come. Yes this costs money. Not getting involved costs more. It does no good to pretend that Amiga/Aqua users and potential Amiga/Aqua users have no interest in participating fully in that "consensual hallucination" known as cyberspace. Thanks to William Gibson there. We don't want to make Amiga/Aqua users, closet Wintel users in order to get access to the complete Net.

If licensing is a problem -- coming up with the dough being the tough part, then an intermediate position on standards would be to have all the open ones implemented on the Amiga/Aqua platform(s). For instance there is jps. Any Amiga/Aqua support here at present? I don't think so. What is it? Its stereo jpeg. Right, an open standard for 3D images. How cool an Amiga/Aqua graphics app that rendered in jps would be. OK, how does that get done?...

Amino should make it a policy to support with loot, gelt, dead presidents, long green, all right I mean financial support, those part-time amiga programmers who are developing innovative apps that will float the entire platform to a higher level. This doesn't mean that every student programming yet another desktop clock as a way to complete an assignment in his class at school gets support. I don't think so. But the ones who want to move the entire platform into amazing new territory the way that DPaint and Lightwave did in their time deserve support. It seems that part time programmers are about all we've got left on the Amiga. Bill and Fleecy should know this better than any other Amiga owner.

Help the TigerTronics guy and other developers like him in tangible ways.

Speaking of support...

What dear reader, are you doing to support our developers? In November I bought Felix Schwarz's fxPaint from his Innovative website. Soon I will upgrade to the new Photogenics and register Image Engineer and Visual Engineer. What are you doing in this area? Well do something.

BTW fxPaint is great. Thank you Felix.

9. With Rebol's participation, the Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix is by definition a network computer. Go with it. Think of the Net as Arexx writ large. All apps should have both Arexx and Rebol ports. Make the Net part of every Amiga/Aqua computing experience. Networking Amiga/Aquas for gaming or amazing midi cyber-symphonies should be as easy as plugging the machine into the mains.

There were some interesting QNX ideas that should get incorporated into whatever Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix machine emerges in the future. Judging from various demos it appears that QNX supports distributed computing, what with demos of apps moving from one computer to another. A future Amiga OS framework should facilitate building this capability into every app. Wouldn't it be great if me and my mates could link all our Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix computers for the afternoon into a render farm linked by the Net to render my 3D ray-traced animation? What else could this capability do for Amigan creatives?

10. Audio video support on the Amiga/Aqua has got to be more than merely access to information in multi-media format. Amigans are creators. There have got to be digitizer hardware and decent software for producing streaming audio and video. As I have said before in other columns, desktop video at the sub $300 range is completely a Wintel application at this point. An easy way to correct this would be to set up user consortiums to write code for software drivers for appropriate hardware and to develop at least the basic software to run this stuff. For instance the Winnov or Dazzle digitizers come immediately to mind. Network thinking.

11. Will there be Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix ambassadors to shareware programmers on other platforms to persuade them to port their apps to Amiga/Aqua? If not why not? For instance there are some interesting shareware video editors coming out of Danish, Swiss, and Russian programmers. The only problem with their stuff is that it runs on Wintel only. This doesn't blindside an existing Amiga developer because no Amigans are developing video editors. If at least one of them could be persuaded to port, presto The Amiga/Aqua has a garage video editing capability. A revolution needs ambassadors. Ben Franklin did some good for the revolutionary cause while in Paris during the American Revolution. Learn from the past.

Speaking of consortium ambassadors, is anybody talking to the Amiga Dispora companies? Hash, Scala, DSP, Draco, Newtek, Main Concept, Byte by Byte, Black Belt, the list goes on. They have already made an investment in millions of lines of Amiga code. Maybe they would like to take a shot at recouping that investment with Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix.

12. Here's a must have Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix software suite... web browser, word processing, DTP, relational database, audio sample editor, a music production suite (mods, midi, sampling), video editing, paint program, image manipulation program, html authoring program, ray tracing program, business support program, programming app, IRQ client, and FTP, without this stuff there is no viable product.

13. Instead of Annex, get Bijorn Lynne aka Dr Awsome to compose a Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix theme song. To give AmigaInc. some credit, having a song and a spokes-band was a smart move. With so much doom and gloom on the Amiga scene -- Angst perpetrated by drive-by listserv press releases, web-vapor, and other disasters -- bringing some art and music on to the scene was a good idea. Good looking chicks too. That's just boomer talk. This has happened before. I loved it that B.B. King used an Amiga and Commodore highlighted the fact. I wonder if he named his computer Lucille like his guitar. Ghoul and Muddy should have booked him to record the "The Seriously Real Down Home Bitchin Amiga Blues" Well suits can't dance, so what do you expect.

I'm tired of that Boing Ball, aren't you? In a post-Boing world, what constitutes an amazing image? Get Jeff Schwartz to go after this with his Amiga Monitor Guy. I love that cartoon of defiant little beat up computer. It kind of looks like R2D2 after a mugging. What would the Darkage guys cook up?

This is the computer for the creative. Don't forget it. Get the creative juices flowing with a Phoenix Festival. Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix should sponsor a Mods, IFF, 3D, Anim, and programming festival. The community, what's left of it, needs something creative and positive to focus on. Make it annual.

Here's an idea. In the 3D ray-tracing category, if Ron Thornton were willing, Have Foundation Imaging (remember Babylon 5?) render the winners stuff on the highest end system they have. Do something similar for the other categories as well. How can we get Abbey Road to donate an hour of studio mixing time?... Oh Giorgio...

14. Wintel is the present and soon to be the past. Keep track of emerging competitors like Nuon, Java, Be, Red Hat, Caldera, and others. Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix doesn't have a monopoly on good ideas and could get their butt kicked hard by a whole gaggle of other smart guys. Think coopitition. That's cooperation and competition with the same company at the same time. Even with Gateway. Think about it.

15. Rethink the aesthetics of the hardware design. The world doesn't need yet another beige breadbox. Even typing this makes me sleepy just thinking of it zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

OK! Back now! Right.

Make the Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix such a compelling object that one must interact with it because its so beautiful. The Psion 3 series had this quality. It looked like it had been sculpted. Its graceful curves were such that one wanted to hold it because it fit your hand so well. Remember the Escom Walker? It was their Amiga reference design. While many scoffed, it was true innovation in design. It did look cool; cooler than the iMac. Walker had a retro-tech resonance like "The Phantom Menace" did. The iMac's looks are a big reason that it is such a hit.

Aesthetics don't matter? If you think so, then you really need to read David Gelernter's "Machine Beauty".

16. Rethink the GUI paradigm. Amiga/Aqua could be the best old system. No Alternatives? Ha! How about Lifestream, InXight, that's just for starters. The community of Amiga interface programmers came up with MUI, Scalos, Dopus, and others. Therefore the Amiga community has the conceptual thoughtware to go beyond the GUI in a very compelling way already inside its own circle of developers.

17. User support isn't an option. Those Phase 5 type horror stories can't continue. The late unlamented ICD was my personal horror story. The Platform group has to police itself on this. Sure support is a burden on small companies. But its important. No excuses. Deal with it. If it is just too much to handle, get creative and consider outsourcing support to a group willing to undertake this. If it is a common reference platform and all hardware and software conforms to it... well support for the whole platform could be outsourced. Think different.

18. I'm trying to be diplomatic about this, but there is a "follow-through" problem among elements of the Phoenix group. I'm tired of being manipulated by everybody associated with the Amiga. AmigaInc. topped the list, of course. But as I look over the Phoenix list ("we few, we happy few, we band of brothers...." Quick, get Kenneth Branagh.), for all the heroic talk, I see a lot of no-shows, guys with Websites littered with JoeCards, Siamese boards, Blizzards, Boxers, Java Virtual Machines, and Kosh vapor.

Gosh, its getting pretty hard to see in here.

Its not a list that inspires confidence in the ability to execute anything in a timely manner. Come on guys this has really got to stop. Again, its true that AmigaInc. was no better, but defining what is acceptable in customer communication by the actions of failed communicators is not acceptable. Remember that 400% perception of benefit required for platform change. On the edge of the chasm before the platform leap, relationships count.

All this vapor no-show stuff does is piss off Amigans. The Amigan community is war weary and needs more than press releases and a techno-corporate version of Titus Andronicus as presented by the inmates of Amiga to focus on. Amiga-vapor is self-inflicted FUD. I thought the boys in Redmond, the Microslothies were the past masters of sowing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (i.e. FUD). But they don't hold a candle to Amiga developers or all those Gateway/AI managerial suits when it comes to destabilizing the dwindling Amiga community. Far more than any other factor, uncertainty and broken promises by ALL commercial entities involved with Amiga hardware has accelerated the decline of the Amiga community. Personally I'm so irritated by the twin no-shows of the Siamese card, (hello Mike) and the Nordic Global no-show on the Java Virtual Machine (Yo Holgar). What's up with that? Seen the Encena board anyone? Impulse Card? Iwin?

There is a solution to this....

Get professional PR help. There is a happy equilibrium between starting with the publishing of a great specs fanfare and endingin a no-show cloud of vapor on one hand, and a stealth -- run silent run deep -- mode with a complete blackout on news on the other. Then we have Fleecy in Elvis mode PR. That's those surprising, unexpected drive-by announcements that pop up all over the Net. Usually they're followed with equally sudden disappearances and no follow up. Its no worse a PR mode than what the rest have done -- not better either. Communication isn't established. Heads up! Elvis is in the building.

Now what was that about a happy equilibrium?

Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix should consider a steady release of activity reports. No need to give away state secrets, but some regular and steady communication about Amiga projects. Just show us the room where programming is taking place. Lucas Film is past masters of this. Star Wars.com kept up a steady stream of interesting information without really giving away much of anything. Everybody understands slipped deadlines. It is practically expected in high tech. Ever know an American fighter plane to ship on time? But when a steady information relationship has been built up, users are less likely to panic or get discouraged due to delay.

Ah AAAP guys, I know what you're thinking...

PR bah! We can't afford this.

And I say in reply, Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix (AAAP) can't afford not to. There is no second chance for you guys. AAAP can easily become AARP (American Association of Retired Persons). You need a trusting relationship with your potential customers. The Amiga doesn't have that.

19. Set up your business entity so that average Amigans can buy shares in the enterprise for say $50 or less. Voting shares of course. BTW its also good business practice because it creates lock-in. People are going to stick around if they have bought shares in the enterprise. Hey is that an IPO in your pocket or are you just glad to see me? Thanks Mae (West).

20. Do something radical. Something completely off the radar. Fire everybody's imagination. Create buzz. One possibility would be an Amiga port of Ted Nelson's Udanax here or here, the GNU Open Source version of the fabled Xanadu, what could have been the web in a parallel universe. Nelson is the guy who invented the term Hypertext in 1964. See Ted Nelson's Xanalogical Media: Needed Now More Than Ever for a conceptual overview.

Or if you don't like that idea, I have others. (A tip of the Hatlo hat to Marshall McLuhan for that one.) How about this. The Amiga never really got into AI, artificial intelligence. Maybe now is the time. Agents are very useful for a variety of things that Amigans do. It could be a killer app that makes the AAAP compelling. I want AI in my word processing. E-mail me and I'll tell you why.

That's it. Those are the twenty points of advise for Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix and the Post-Amiga Amigans. I hope it helps. For a moment before we go, lets consider metaphor...like the metaphor of the Phoenix.

The Phoenix myth has two parts. In the first half the Phoenix crashes and burns. In the second part he arises from the ashes and flies away in triumph. Frankly its not clear exactly which part of the story we Amigans are in right now. We need communication and very importantly real tangible deeds from the Amiga/Amino/Aqua/Phoenix group. If the development path that the group is going down has any relationship to the one I outlined, then sign me up. I want to be an Aqua(marine).

Off.

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