Re:The 68000 Wars, Part 3: We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up
by vidarh on Saturday April 11, 2015 @08:33PM
(#9361462)
Look towards applications. It's that simple.
Amiga "owned" the TV market for a long time because it happened to get some important products first (Video Toaster for example).
Apple got better desktop publishing tools first.
E.g. if you wanted to do TV you during some period would want a product like the Video Toaster. If you wanted to do newspapers, you'd want Quark.
While there may have been certain platform quirks that tilted the initial creation of those tools in one direction or another (such as genlock support for video for the Amiga), platform mattered far less than application, and early application traction in a niche would paper over a lot of other platform issues.
WYSIWYG output for printing was largely still an application issue, not a platform issue, for example. Exactly for those kinds of reasons, an application lead also translated to a platform lead for those kind of niches where people would buy the platform to support an application rather than the other way around. People would buy Quark, and a Mac to run it, not pick a system and see what desktop publishing would run on it. If you loved the Amigas pre-emptive multitasking and "colourful" (compared to the Mac..) environment, tough - it couldn't run Quark (been there - had exactly that discussion back in those days).
Regarding PPC, note that the PPC cards for the Amiga appeared after Commodore had already gone bankrupt, as far as I know. At least PowerUP first appeared in '97 after Amiga Technologies announced Amiga going PPC in '95. It'd been largely obvious the game was over at least from 95-96 even for most die-hard supporters.
Interestingly, had Commodore continued it's clear the next generation Amigas would have most likely been different - the prototype "Hombre" chipset was a SOC that included a HP PA-RISC core [1]. Interestingly Commodore apparently choice PA-RISC primarily with the intent of being able to run Windows NT (at the time of the decision, the lower priced PPC - and MIPS - alternatives were not supported for NT) - something which would have been massively controversial with a lot of Amiga users.
Amiga "owned" the TV market for a long time because it happened to get some important products first (Video Toaster for example).
Apple got better desktop publishing tools first.
E.g. if you wanted to do TV you during some period would want a product like the Video Toaster. If you wanted to do newspapers, you'd want Quark.
While there may have been certain platform quirks that tilted the initial creation of those tools in one direction or another (such as genlock support for video for the Amiga), platform mattered far less than application, and early application traction in a niche would paper over a lot of other platform issues.
WYSIWYG output for printing was largely still an application issue, not a platform issue, for example. Exactly for those kinds of reasons, an application lead also translated to a platform lead for those kind of niches where people would buy the platform to support an application rather than the other way around. People would buy Quark, and a Mac to run it, not pick a system and see what desktop publishing would run on it. If you loved the Amigas pre-emptive multitasking and "colourful" (compared to the Mac..) environment, tough - it couldn't run Quark (been there - had exactly that discussion back in those days).
Regarding PPC, note that the PPC cards for the Amiga appeared after Commodore had already gone bankrupt, as far as I know. At least PowerUP first appeared in '97 after Amiga Technologies announced Amiga going PPC in '95. It'd been largely obvious the game was over at least from 95-96 even for most die-hard supporters.
Interestingly, had Commodore continued it's clear the next generation Amigas would have most likely been different - the prototype "Hombre" chipset was a SOC that included a HP PA-RISC core [1]. Interestingly Commodore apparently choice PA-RISC primarily with the intent of being able to run Windows NT (at the time of the decision, the lower priced PPC - and MIPS - alternatives were not supported for NT) - something which would have been massively controversial with a lot of Amiga users.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset