V greater than X

Could AmigaOS 5 have come out in 2003, 2004, or 2005? Would developers be ready for such a paradigm shift? Would the user-base accept such a dramatic move away from the computing norms? When you look at how much fanfare the Amiga community dishes out for some of the incremental improvements made in OS 4.x, MOS 2.x, and AROS, things that by computer industry standards are trivial, I’m not sure they’re ready for it even in 2011.

 

As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that “AmigaOS 5 Beta” will be met by much criticism from many members of the Amiga community.

 

Early Impressions

mmmmm, omelette

The OS is pretty well done. I was able to test many aspects of the technologies listed above. It was very responsive and things are working as one would expect them to. That said, it’s important to remember that there is no gain without loss. The old “You’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelette”. So whilst there are many improvements over the previous versions of AmigaOS, there are many things that are no longer there as they make little sense in a modern computing landscape.

 

Hardware support is pretty good, USB 2.0, IEEE 1394 a/b, GbE, 802.11 b/g/n (WEP/WPA/WPA2), DVD RW, Bluetooth 4.0, PCIe, DDR3 RAM, etc.

 

The library system is quite different to that of classic AmigaOS and OS 4.x. The object oriented design is still there though, to support the meta-data OS many new objects have been created in Objective-C to make development a lot easier, especially in the areas of audio, video, animation, text, and data. Many open standards are supported, OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenCL.

 

The UI layer is completely new and only resembles Workbench in a few areas. On the upside it is predominantly GL optimised with many calls handed over to the GPU. This ticks one of the boxes against the earlier mentioned technologies (Symmetric and Asymmetric modes).

 

All in all a very forward looking OS with a lot of potential. Plenty of that Amiga awesomeness we’ve all grown so fond of over the years. If this OS were an animal in the African savanna it would be perched right on top of the food chain, all other animals would tremble from its mighty roar, kind of like a Lion.

 

Two Questions: How Much? and Give it to Me!

Hopefully by now you’ve caught on to the fact that this is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek piece. But in the spirit of the article I will continue. So how do I get to try the “AmigaOS 5 Beta”?

 

Interestingly enough, “AmigaOS 5 Beta” was not developed by Amiga Development India but rather Apple Inc. Another interesting thing is that it requires that you are running Mac OS X 10.6.x on a compatible intel Mac computer. It is available exclusively though the Mac App Store and will set you back the equivalent of US$29 or thereabouts.

 

It seems those guys at Cupertino have relaxed their application approval process

 

The Real Questions

Another Summer Comes
So here we are. June of 2011. Summer’s not quite here but we’re so close we can see it from where we’re standing (for northern hemisphere folk). 26 summers ago Commodore released the Amiga 1000 upon the world, and if you agree with my previous post, upon our hearts. And with a clear voice told the world; other personal computers are tools, this one is a friend.

A-Eon’s aim to release the X1000 in the summer of 2010 would have been terrific for several reasons; First, and most obvious, those who looked forward to buying one would’ve had one for an entire year by now. Second, it would have been a nice touch to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Amiga. Third, and for a start-up probably most important, they would have done good on their word. Not that any promises where made, but it pays to achieve goals in accordance with a written or verbal schedule. Consumer confidence and all that stuff.

At the end of the day 25 is just another number, and apart from the reasons listed above, and their respective flow-on effects, 26 is just as good a number. Many X1000 hold-outs are genuinely optimistic when they proclaim “It’s not too late for A-Eon to release the X1000”. But I’m here to offer another, also optimistic view; It’s not too late for A-Eon to pull out.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower

Change Tack

On the eve of what was one of the greatest war offensives in recorded human history, General Dwight D. Eisenhower has been quoted as saying “Plans are nothing, Planning is everything”. It is a philosophy rooted in the knowledge that circumstances are constantly changing and demand our vigilance and adaptivity. Plans represent a point-in-time view; what might have been true then is not necessarily true today. Planning represents adaptation to a new set of circumstances.

To use the sub-heading’s nautical theme, when the prevailing winds are favourable, we can stay on our original tack with a bit of trim (sail adjustment) here and there. But when the winds change, and we want to continue sailing, we need to change tack. This means changing the direction of motion by up to 90 degrees. You’re still heading in the same general direction, but you’re approaching it from a different angle.

Some of you may say that the amount of change in the wind requires only a bit of sail adjustment, I say the winds weren’t that good for this tack to start with, and a year later there’s been enough change to justify a change of tack. Forget the plans from 2009/2010, and start planning.

Planning
Please feel free to put your thoughts forward on why A-Eon should continue with their original plans, in the meantime I’ll explain why it’s not too late for them to bail on those plans. (The following is a hypothetical planning session).

Lets take stock. What have we (A-Eon) got thus far:

1. An OS that is commercially bound to the PowerPC microprocessor architecture.
2. Decent investment of funds into Nemo development boards.
3. Decent investment (or deposit) for the manufacture of a set number (hundreds) of X1000 boards and other non-commodity paraphernalia (case, keyboard, etc).
4. Verbal, architectural, and in some ways a philosophical commitment to use the Xena (XMOS) programmable co-processor.
5. Fragmentation of the core target demographic over multiple Amiga-like offerings.
6. High price tag (if we want to break even on the short-run PC manufacturing).
7. Key open source applications being ported to the platform (Firefox, OpenOffice).

What does our core demographic want:

1. An OS that is free and open.
2. Developers developing for the platform.
3. Powerful hardware. The kind that isn’t too far behind the x86 counterparts.
4. Something to set us apart from the rest of the Windows and Apple crowd.
5. Unified user-base supporting the true Amiga NG platform.
6. Reasonable price tag. The kind that’s not too far above the x86 counterparts.
7. Choice of freeware, shareware, and big-name commercial applications that shine on the platform.

What do ‘we’ want:

1. An OS that allows us to do things rather than prohibit us from doing things. An OS that developers want to develop for.
2. Developers developing for the platform.
3. Second, and third generation hardware. We want this thing to keep growing because we have a vision.
4. Something to set our products apart from the Windows and Apple products. We’re not playing catch-up, we’re not even looking at leap-frog. Like the Wii in the world of Xbox 360 and PS3, we want to define a unique experience.
5. A user-base that may use other platforms, but is using our product for 90% of their computing needs. Like with the original Amiga, a user-base that has a sense of endearment and loyalty to the brand.
6. A price tag that our customers consider reasonable, but also makes us a decent profit. That way we can invest in new products and extend the platform.
7. An ecosystem that will encourage freeware, shareware, and big-name commercial applications to be developed specifically for the platform. Ports are nice, but native apps rock.

Now lets look at the themes and patterns. We want a lot of the same things our core demographic wants, and our second and third demographics would surely appreciate (rich ecosystem with a respectable number of developers creating freeware, shareware, and big-name commercial applications, and something to set us apart from our contemporaries), other mutually inclusive themes are things like the reasonable price tag. It covers what our core demographic wants, but it also feeds the proliferation of the platform and gets it into more hands. More users equals more developers interested in developing for the platform.

The one caveat, the thing we can’t do, if Hyperion is going to make money from their OS investment, is port AmigaOS to another microprocessor architecture. Yes, Arm is nice, x86 is cheap as chips (see what I did there?), but we are wedded to the PowerPC. For better or for worse.

For Better
So here’s what we can do and still cover the things that both ‘we’ and our user-base want.

We pull the plug on the current plan. Any boards currently developed or already in the pipeline will be considered development boards. The thing isn’t reducing in price at the rate we expected.

Now if all those boards are going to be development boards, what will be the user board?

The users want a good price/performance ratio. They want board prices similar to those of the intel/AMD motherboards. They’re not unreasonable in expecting this. Whilst these boards are manufactured in the thousands, the components on these are mostly the same as those found on the Nemo; PCIe, PCI, SATA, PATA, USB2.0, GbE, AC97, DDR2 RAM, BIOS, etc. So the real differences are a different socket, different controller chipset, and lets not forget the Xena. So why are we building a board that has 80% of the components found on $100.00 board? So I say, lets do that, lets give the users a commodity PC motherboard.

What? I thought you said we can’t port AmigaOS to x86.

And we won’t. Let me finish. We go with an AMD chipset board, something that is used by all the main motherboard producers; ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI. The other reason we go with AMD is because the socket doesn’t change as often as it does with intel, and the AMD CPU’s cost less. So our dual PCIe 16x non-custom board + AMD CPU is about $300.00 to the consumer. We give ourselves a ceiling of $1000.00 for the consumer price for the board solution, which leaves us $500.00 – $600.00 (per unit) to source, design, and produce a PCIe PPC board, there are some Freescale QoreIQ parts that would fit nicely. We can try and have the Xena on the same PCIe board or we can just use another of the slots on the motherboard, whichever costs less. After all, the XMOS parts are not PPC specific.

So AmigaOS runs on the PPC board!

To help you visualise the solution

Correct. We use Linux, BSD, or COUGH(aros)! to create a mini-OS that boots off the x86 AMD and loads only the bare necessities to provide a soft UBoot environment for AmigaOS to see the PPC CPU, the PCIe bridge, and all the other devices presented through the soft UBoot (the other PCIe/PCI slots, SATA, PATA, USB2.0, GbE, AC97, DDR2 RAM. It won’t be as fast as a native motherboard, but for AmigaOS 4 it will still be very fast. It’ll be much faster than the SAM460 and for not much more in terms of price. Architecturally it’d be not too dissimilar to a Classic Amiga with a PPC board, consider it as replacing the 68k sub-platform with a x86 sub-platform.

The key is, we get to provide a multi-core AmigaOS 4 computer with modern hardware, and we get to shave a good $1000,00 off the original price tag. It’s a bit Frankensteinien to start with, but the end result is the important thing. Not only are we still in the game, but we are better positioned to satisfy the things we and our users want. And I’m sure there’s a few other things clever developers would do with a box like this.

So what’s stopping someone to buy any x86 board they want, buy the A-Eon PCIe PPC and Xena board or boards, compiling their own kernel, purchasing Amiga OS, and building their own AmigaOne computer?

Nothing. Why would we want to stop a thing like that.

Conclusion
It’s not too late for A-Eon to pull out of it’s original plan and come up with a new one. The one I’ve presented up here is just one of a few possible alternatives. Most of their efforts to date would not be wasted. They can still end up at their destination.

They would no doubt be concerned about user backlash if they told everyone that they are changing their plans. To this I say “We’re Amigans. Plan changes are nothing new to us. Just don’t tell us you’re getting out of the Amiga business.”

What do you guys say? Would you mind a change of plans if they were for the better?

Eddie Cejvan

Ownership
One of the topics that’s been dominating the Amiga news recently, as I’m sure many of you have noticed, is the issue of Amiga licences. Trademarks, copyrights, OS 3.x, OS 4.x, PPC, Cloanto, CommodoreUSA, etc. To add to the problem, without citing any existing legal documents, a multitude of pundits in the Amiga community have made statements regarding the legality of this company or that company having the right to use a trademark or distribute software.

I always knew there was much work to be done until the OS and software library could catch up to the computing norms derived from dominant platforms like Windows and Mac OS X, but it seems it was more important to catch up with the likes of Microsoft and Apple in IP law turmoil. If this is what the thousands of Amiga enthusiasts and hobbyists were aiming for, then congratulations are in order. Mission accomplished.

I Agree with Uncle Carl
If Carl Sassenrath happens to read this post I hope he doesn’t mind me referring to him with what I consider a term of endearment. Whilst there were many creative and passionate engineering personalities involved with the delivery of the Amiga platform, I’m singling out Carl because of one of the key philosophies he adhered to way back then. He has been vocal about it over these many years, and he feels just as strongly about it today, and I agree with his philosophy.

To paraphrase; The user ‘owns’ the computer, and not the other way around. In everything uncle Carl does, the belief in this philosophy has shaped the solution. With other computer platforms the user comes second, and in some cases third, where with the Amiga the user came first. In fact, it could be stated with a high degree of confidence, the Amiga computer was the first computer ‘owned’ by the user. This simple philosophy contributed significantly to the popularity of the platform in the late 80′s and early 90′s, and in no small way accounted for the unique emotional reaction users experienced, and are feeling to this very day. Users own the Amiga.

Capitalism vs. Patriotism
So why all of a sudden have we preoccupied ourselves with this issue of corporate level IP ownership? I guess we all like to see a good fight, but why should we users care about names, brands, or IP rights to place specific program code on a specific microprocessor architecture? Have we all forgotten what owning and using an Amiga is all about? And it’s not about what we use it for, the forgotten question is why we use it?

Yes, it’s a commercial playing field out there. A computer platform is a business endeavor. Developers develop applications to create revenue. Even in the Linux world there is commercialization. There is no free lunch.

I’ll take this opportunity to introduce a polarized argument; Capitalism vs. Patriotism. I find this to be very relevant to the current Amiga landscape. Capitalism being the need to seed the platform in a commercially viable venture vs. the Patriotism-like devotion of the Amiga user base.

The western world, in particular the United States, is confronted by this in a very profound way. The reason the argument exists is that too many enterprising individuals, that would consider themselves patriots, will leverage lower cost labour/components from other countries to increase their profit margins, at the expense of depleting related market segments at home, and in some cases contributing to the complete collapse of domestic sectors, which then require government subsidies/bailouts. And let’s not forget the thousands of people left without work, which again requires government monetary support. Not very patriotic. There is a very excellent book published in 2006 called China Inc. that I recommend to anyone interested in this topic.

How is this related to the Amiga? The individuals that are looking to make a profit from our Amiga Patriotism are doing so at the expense of the very “country” we live in. All of them are so concerned by who ‘owns’ what because that is important in business, but all of them have lost focus on what they’re in business for.

A colleague of mine, who I think very highly of, will often use the market mantra of “competition is good for the consumer”. In this point he is mislead, the truth of the matter is that choice is good for the consumer. Though one of many ways to provide consumer choice, Competition is the worst way to do it because, whilst it may be good for a group of consumers, it is ultimately bad for the wider consumer group or “country” as a whole, and therefore can be argued to be non-Patriotic.

Competition results in conflict, conflict is a form of war, wars devastate entire landscapes, those who profit from war are those who have no problem counting their winnings whilst standing on the corpses of their countrymen. Not very Patriotic.

The Hearts and Minds
Not to paint too grim a picture of commercialism and the things laid waste in its pursuit, there are other ways to conduct business. To make a long story short, the key is to balance the responsibilities to the investors and customers. This is something Commodore failed to do, though not from a lack of dedicated and user focused engineers trying to balance against the corporate greed.

What many business ventures will attempt, but not many will succeed to do, is the proverbial “winning the hearts and minds” of their consumers. Trying to sell a compelling product that we can rationalise, and at the same time ensure we have an emotional reaction to it.

The Amiga 1000 out of the gate hit us with a clear value proposition aimed at our minds; Do things you couldn’t do with any other personal computer. Multitasking, vibrant images, colourful animations, multi-channel sound, and all at a fraction of the price of other personal computers. The emotional response came after people actually started using it to express their creativity.

The emotional response grew, and as Commodore began its decent, the speeds and feeds aspects that are aimed at the mind began to slip compared to the competition. This suicidal strategy was in no small part fed by the devotional following of the Amiga users, which stemmed from their emotional attachment to their Amigas. Commodore (mis)management felt that the Amiga user’s ‘heart’ will buy any new Amiga even if the ‘mind’ doesn’t think it’s good value for money. Think back to the early 90’s and many of us will remember having this attitude. Commodore sucked, but our Amiga could never do wrong.

Today we have a bunch of companies trying to make a business out of the remaining embers of the feelings we still have for this venerable platform. Everyone is going after the mind; Morphos is good value for money, A-Eon’s X1000 will be the fastest Amiga ever sold. But unlike the mid 80’s and the A1000, these companies cannot just sit by and hope we become emotionally attached based on our fondness for the Amiga. Any truly new “Amiga” will need to win our hearts and our minds. It will not have to be called Amiga, it will not have to run Amiga OS with Workbench. It will provide rational value and at the same time will evoke a visceral response. At our very core, within our hearts, we will feel that this new thing is not part of the problem but rather part of the solution.

Maybe it will be the next computer from A-Eon, a X2000 or X500. If not, it will be something delivered by another company. I don’t know who will make it or what it will be called, what I do know is that it will be a computing platform created to be owned by the user.

Eddie Cejvan

About a week ago in one of the frequented Amiga online forums I was engaged in a back-and-forth conversation to do with Amiga’s chances in the hands of A-Eon, where upon in order to defend my position and answer to some scathing accusations, I did what I generally don’t like to do, I flashed my credentials. My business credentials that is. Anyway, the other party, DAX, proceeded to make amends and continue the conversation with a new found zeal given my background. “Well at least shed some free advice, don’t just bash them ” DAX proclaimed, after which I pointed him to the many Op-Eds I’ve posted here which I consider ‘free advice’. After some time had past DAX asked in all sincerity “given that money restrains are REAL (this must be taken into account), what could Aeon/Hyperion improve in your opinion?”

A Bit of History
I have been researching the viability of a completely new computing platform since May 2001. I could say that it is Amiga inspired but that would be misleading, for it would bring up ideas of a platform resurrection. It would be more accurate to think of it as an Amiga reincarnation. It’s a large scale project that requires $1M+ to start-off and has nothing to do with AmigaOS 4, Morphos (MOS), or AROS. If you’ve read some of my other Op-Eds you’ll know what I think of all of these.

Nevertheless, I felt that it would be a nice exercise to put down how I would have approached the situation were I asked for a plan or strategy, or if I were the primary angel investor in this chapter of the Amiga story. The year is 2009 and the mediation process has just been finalised with a somewhat favourable outcome for Hyperion, and in this version, Trevor Dickinson has not yet had any discussions with Ben Hermans.

What Have We Got
Since the parties involved are not all that forthcoming with the details I have made some educated guesses based on uncomfortable silences, question evasion, reading between the lines, slipped comments, and thanks to video, body language. Plus there are some hard facts that don’t need to be spelled out.

We have an operating system largely based on the source code of the classic AmigaOS that has been, for lack of a better term, uplifted to the PowerPC architecture. Currently usable at 4.1 and there’s a lot of work still to be done. We have a software company with the worldwide rights to distribute AmigaOS 4 and the rights to the AmigaOne brand. There are no full time coders and everything is done via contracts. We have a community of several thousand Amiga stalwarts spread all over the world. We have some competition in the form of Morphos and AROS. There’s a good chance that the settlement awards conditional rights to the AmigaOS 4 (OS 4) to do with processor architecture so porting to another architecture is out, even if it were economically viable to move to ARM or MIPS. We have AMCC SoC based PowerPC boards from ACube Systems; 440ep and 440ep-flex. There is free and shareware applications for OS 4 but not a lot of commercial software, which makes sense given the small size of the install base; If I had to guess, around 50 running on classic w/ PPC, around 70 on the Eyetech AmigaOne boards, around 30 on Pegasos boards, and around 150 running on the Sam 440 boards. There are many quick and beta-like ports from the open sourced Linux world and the OS 4 install base can’t grow much as a lot of applications get ported to MOS and even AROS. We can’t blame the developers, they’re just trying to reach as many customers as possible.

Hypothetically Hyperion
So as an angel investor and a long time Amigan I decide to do something about it and start having conversations with Ben Hermans about my plan to grow the OS 4 install base. Ben likes the idea and wants me to put together a pack. I put together a business plan based around small amounts of investment from some other angel investors I have worked with before. I meet with Ben and present the plan for starting small and growing slowly but steadily.

I ask him “what’s the number one road block for you to selling more OS 4?” He answers “software”. “Exactamundo”. Ben knows as well as I do that that the Sam440 boards are fine for most purposes. What’s stopping people from buying more of them to run OS 4 is a lack of software. I’m not talking about the high end professional niche kind of software, I’m talking the kind that my friend’s grandma is taking for granted, the kind that every kid at school is using, is available for free at very high quality and user satisfaction, the software without which the masses would be wondering how they lived before it.

I ask him “Out of the 300-500 OS 4 users out there, what do you think is their number one item on their wish list?” Ben shrugs. “That’s OK Ben, I’ve done the research; up-to-date web browser with flash support.” Whilst there have been some commendable efforts in this area in terms of WebKit and Firefox ports, this needs to be taken in-house. We’ll get some of the more popular plug-ins ported as well. We can follow-up with Thunderbird and Sunbird ports as well at a later date.

Even though the users will be able to access online office apps, the second thing needed is offline office apps. OpenOffice is nice but what we need is something more lightweight, we’ll port KOffice, start with KWord and KSpread, and then slowly do the others later. It’ll be a nice ongoing thing.

“For my next wish I want unlimited wishes.” Ben chuckles. What I mean Ben, is we port over a platform with existing software. I’ve talked to Adobe, and with the right level of sponsorship we can have the PowerPC version of Adobe Air ported to OS 4.

You know Ben, I’d like to make this an ongoing partnership and I’d like to be able to talk to you over the net, so I spoke to Skype and negotiated the porting of the PowerPC version to OS 4.

I’m proposing we form a new company under partnership that will produce and own these software assets, and license them exclusively to AmigaOS 4. As you can see in the business plan, we expect to double the user base in the first year. To incentivise the rapid bump up in install base, you’ll need to offer OS 4 for free with the next 500 Sam boards. From our investment fund we’ve allocated $50,000 to subsidise the next 500 Sam440 boards to make them even more appealing; $50 off of the 440ep or $100 off the 440ep-flex. With the four software projects costing $150,000 that brings it to a $200,000 investment. All the software except the office suite will be given away for free. The office suite will have a very reasonable price.

“That all looks pretty good Eddie, are you sure the Sam440’s are up to the task?”
“No they’re not Ben, but that’s OK”. In the research conducted we discovered that the majority of users will trade speed for functionality. Does it really matter that OWB runs really really fast? Plus, it’s a business approach that has been proven several times in the past, 12 months from now there’ll be faster hardware and it will cost less. I bet with twice the install base ACube will move quicker to make a faster board. And if they’re not interested, we’ll find someone in China who is. I know you’re a fan of complete systems, but initially we start with the board, no need to make the higher shipping costs a deterrent, the users we’re targeting in the first year are capable of putting together their own system, they actually kind of prefer it. We’ll include a nice sticker.

The key is to get people to use these things on a regular basis. It’s been shown that when users are vested in a platform, they’d rather upgrade than move to another platform. In the first year we’re targeting the wider everyday usage scenarios. The second year we’ll start working on software that is more targeted to a specific use and will make OS 4 appealing to users outside the Amiga community. And as you can see in the Year 2 financials of the business plan, the foundation we laid down in Year 1 will help us go to market much faster to fill specific niches.

Meanwhile, Back on Planet Earth
The above scenario is not as fantastical as you might think. I have actually done market research, and since Apple’s announcement that Mac OS X 10.6 will be intel only I have spoken to Skype, and Adobe about the PowerPC versions of their clients and what it would take to continue working on them.

I know DAX was referring to the contemporary A-Eon/Hyperion and what they could improve on. Unfortunately A-Eon have asserted on several occasions that they are a hardware company, and they’ve kind of promised to release the X1000. They’re a good way down the track and it would be silly to pull the plug now. But there’s really nothing stopping them from executing, for the most part, what I’ve outlined above after they release the X1000.

Eddie Cejvan

I will from time to time, as I’m sure many of you do, get into a conversation to do with the yesteryear of computing. Sentences like “I remember paying $500.00 for my first 20MB HD” and “Remember how slow a 1200 baud modem was?” would fill the room as heads would shake, eyes would role, and smiles exchanged over how much things have changed over the years.

Or Have They?
As I read the various posts, in the handful of active Amiga forums, relating to the various operating systems (OS) available to the Amiga community today I find that very little has changed over the past 25 years. Granted, the Amiga faithful have at their disposal more in terms of choice but the behaviour of the OS proponents hasn’t changed. Where it used to be Windows 3.1 vs. Mac System 7 vs. Amiga (DOS) Workbench 3.0, it is now AROS vs. MorphOS vs. AmigaOS 4.

From a multitude of causes, two stick out as the main culprits; One, all three of our current “choices” have more in common with their progeny from 1992 than they do with the present day versions of their former competitors. The Amiga may have been years ahead of its time, but not that many years. And Two,

Users still confuse OS with UI
This particular behaviour may also be in part due to the attachment of the current operating systems to the one from 1992, as I recall I was saying it even way back then: Windows, Workbench, and Finder are not the OS, they are User Interfaces (UI). Yes, each OS comes with its own UI, but user interfaces actually have more in common with other applications running on the respective OS than with the OS itself.

It’s understandable that an attachment to a UI would develop; it is after all the visualisation a user is presented with upon every computer use. Combined with the perception of the UI as the OS, and the attachment to the UI, users have actually developed an attachement to the OS. Something a user should never develop.

Who should care about the OS?
The OS is only ever relevant to an application developer. They are the ones that will be utilising OS resources to have their application execute and deliver the experience they’re aiming for. But even that is a somewhat outdated view. With a structured and rich SDK and IDE, there could be enough abstraction that the majority of developers would be able to produce applications without needing to gleen much of the OS it will be running on. In essence, as an application delivery platform, the simpler it is for a developer to build, deploy, and target an audience, the more apealing that OS is.

In terms of affectional attachment to a specific OS by users, it doesn’t help that OS producers bundle in a suite of applications to make the OS useful right out of the box, i.e. Web broswer, notepad, calculator, email client, calendar, instant messaging, simple games, etc.

Who should care about the UI?
Counter-intuitively enough, not the user. The user should only ever care about the application. That’s what makes a personal computer such a ubiquitous tool; the ability to run different applications and in one aspect be a content creation device, whilst in another aspect be a content consumption device.

The UI is a way for an application developer to engage, enable, and in the well executed forms, empower users. Sure, the application developer can take the quick/lazy way out and just construct a UI using standard platform UI artifacts, but when an application developer spends the time to understand the user and how they accomplish tasks and shape an application UI to truley interface with the user, then that application is seperated from the merely good enough and becomes one of the very good.

To a user the entire experience is what matters, which is why over the better part of the past decade the focus on User Expereince (UX) has emerged. UX goes beyond the interface and looks at the equation of work put in vs. value drawn out. A particular application’s UX could sit atop a stack of components that includes the OS and its UI, whilst in well executed cross-platform applications the UX is maintained independantly of the OS and its UI.

Conclusion
Platform producers should be in the business of attracting developers. Intuitive, logical, and modern OS design coupled with powerful tools is the way to empower them. A clearly defined revenue model doesn’t hurt either. The better the tools and platfrom, the better the applications and the user experience, and the more users that will be interested in the platform.

So unless you’re an application developer, please don’t expend so much energy in devotion to an OS. I know all of us are trying to project a certain public persona and our ids are on the line, but in the privacy of your own mind ask yourself this question:

In a world with AROS, MorphOS, and AmigaOS 4, where you favour one over the others, if there were a sudden emergence of well developed applications for web browsing with HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and Flash, an ooxml compatible office suite, video capture and editing, music creation and editing, 3D modeling and animation with render farm support, integrated messaging and calendar application with CalDAV support, and Skype client with video support, all of that on one of the less favoured systems, would you move to that system?

My advice, care more about the applications and the user experience, especially in terms of quality and not just quantity.

Eddie Cejvan

I have, over the many years, counciled businesses on the promotion of change, as not only the agent of progress, but more specifically as the tide upon which we all sail. Not all of my work has been conducted in the field of Information Technology, but a lot of it has and for the very good reason that things change more frequently and more disruptively within IT than almost any other field or discipline. You might even say that I’ve made a career of it.

I don’t intend to make this piece about me. The above paragraph is meant to be a primer for what has been an ongoing theme within IT, technology as a whole really, and is of specific relevance to the Amiga, its perpetual woes, and its hope for the future. But before I get to that I’d like to introduce an important colleague of mine;

Commoditisation
In IT, commoditisation is manifested as the constant reduction of the intellectual property (IP) investment for technology application. What used to take five people to do is now done by a single person, what used to require a university degree is now executed by high-school students. What used to be a source of revenue is now offered for free.

Commoditisation in IT is an extensive topic and I won’t discuss it at length here. Suffice to say that any of the current IT trends you care to think of: Virtualisation, SOA, convergence, outsourcing, standardisation, they are all responses to the driving force of commoditisation.

80’s Commodore Amiga vs. 90’s Commodore Amiga
Culturally these two technology streams are very different. The 80’s stream was mostly about building the platform and the 90’s stream was mostly about changing the platform. “No it wasn’t” you say, and I’ll agree with you. Though it should have been. Alas only a handful of individuals within the 90’s stream understood the force commoditisation exerted. Some of them even understood that hardware and software react differently to commoditisation and that hardware outpaces software at rate of change. An organisation needs to understand this if they are going to play with both fields.

The rest of the 1990’s went on without Commodore and many other organisations tried to juggle both hardware and software; Sun Microsystems, Be Inc, NeXT, Silicon Graphics, and Apple, to name a familiar few. But as the years rolled on it became increasingly challenging to maintain the rate of improvements in both at independent rates.

Enter Gateway
So in 1997 Gateway 2000 announces that it has acquired most of the Amiga assets from EsCom and creates a new company ‘Amiga inc.’ to promote Gateway from a mere component integrator to a serious player in the IT space. The Amiga community rejoices.

When they announced that they’ll be getting into the hardware game I cringed. In the climate of the late 90’s it was a foolish decision for a whole heap of reasons. There was nothing about Gateway 2000 at the time that suggested that they understood what it takes to successfully manage both. To this end I wrote them a letter outlining in pragmatic business terms why they should focus on the OS only. Their strategy to improve Linux multimedia capabilities with an Amiga MM layer was not a bad one at all. Think back to how useless Linux was at multimedia back in 97/98. In fact, even today it performs those tasks with sheer inelegance. They did not agree with me in their reply.

Gateway shuts down the Amiga project but licenses some of the tech to a new group with the same name as the former subsidiary, incorporated elsewhere. Their ideas for OS5 were sound; their capacity to execute became infamous. For some reason they also felt that both a hardware and a software stepping stone was required to bridge the gap between 68k OS3.x and a hardware independent OS5. These guys have clearly never heard of commoditisation.

Present Day, and a Bit Before
So here we are again. It seems we’ve all been here before, more than once. And there are many out there who are certain that this time it’s different. “We’ve seen the developer boards at shows, this time it’s different”. “OS4.x already runs on it, this time it’s different”. This is in no way different from the time when Eyetech sold boards bundled with OS4. “The X1000 will be the first new complete system since Commodore filed for bankruptcy, this time it’s different”. Until the system actually comes out it is, for all intents and purposes, no different to the Walker announcement or the Amiga MMC announcement. Which is to say, until it’s released, it’s unreleased.

Conjecture aside, the core business issue is that just like all of the other attempts, this new venture is attempting to play both the hardware and the software games. They have to date not shown that they understand the nature of commoditisation, and appear to be doing everything their less fortunate predecessors have done, only with a bit more caution.

If we go back a little to when Hyperion made references to their Most Ambitious Project (MAP) and we did some crowdsourcing, the majority of the sentiment was in favour of OS4 being ported to x86. Would it have been the best move? We’ll never really know. Is it a plausible move? Very much so. Challenging? Yes. Impossible? No. So the majority of the crowd was fine with Hyperion playing the software game, whilst the hardware was left to whoever is still playing in this highly commoditised space.

Conclusion
I’m not saying that it’s impossible to simultaneously play the hardware and software game. Only a handful of organisations have been able to do so successfully over an extended period of time. Look at the names of 90’s companies listed earlier on, how many of them are around today? The term ‘The Amiga Curse’ gets used every now and then but as you can see it is not confined to the Amiga. One of the reasons it’s accompanied the Amiga brand is that everyone who owned it, thought in terms of both hardware and software. Unless you understand exactly what that means, then you are, for lack of a better word, cursed.

Eddie Cejvan

It has become somewhat of a personal and professional quandary over the past five or so years; how does one cater to the needs of an Amigan? Before I could even come close to having any chance at answering the question I needed to identify and codify what it is that makes an Amigan.

Amigans and Amigaterians
My classification efforts started from my perception of myself and the different roles I’ve played over the last 25 years of Amiga history. It started as a Commodore 64 user reading about the Amiga 1000 in a computer magazine. At that point I was a ‘dreamer’, then I owned an A500 and I was a ‘gamer’, I moved up to an A1200 and I was an ‘enthusiast’, some upgrades later I was using the A1200 in a business setting and I was a ‘professional’, some ambitious ideas, a PPC card and a tower case and I was a ‘developer’, two failed platform restart attempts later and a major user base drain and I was a ‘die-hard fan’, collaborated with the early McBill Amiga Inc. and I was an ‘innovator’, or a ‘traitor’ depending on your point of view, co-host on the seminal Amiga RoundTable podcast and I am one of the ‘Amigarati’.

Over the years I have encountered many other Amiga users and everyone’s journey has been different, but the various roles are the same. Analysing the data I have discovered that there are two distinct recurring themes that I have used to classify all those that have ever used or are still using an Amiga. The classifications are Amigan and Amigaterian. Most of us have at some time or another been one or the other, but overall we would have spent a majority of our time as either an Amigan or an Amigaterian.

The Distinctions
Is there really a need for making a distinction? Wouldn’t it be easier to just consider us all as Amigans as we’ve done up until now? Perhaps, but as I sought to answer my initial question my market research has revealed the two aforementioned distinct varieties. The differences aren’t small enough to be ignored. Here’s what I have discovered:

Amigans have fond memories of the Amiga platform but are now using Windows, Mac, or Linux. They’re not necessarily happy with the situation but they’re using the best tools economically available to them for the tasks at hand.

Amigaterians have fond memories of the Amiga platform and at every opportunity attempt to continue to use an Amiga despite the effort required or the lack of contemporary features, or standards and device support.

Amigans loved using the Amiga because at the time it allowed them to produce superb results with the least amount of hurdles and frustrations. They are outcome driven and are prepared to learn new ways of doing things to improve the quality and timeliness of outcomes.

Amigaterians care more about the merits of an outcome than the outcome quality or timeliness. It is important to them to state that they delivered an outcome using non-mainstream tools and were on a personal level uncompromised, as if to imply that using a Windows, Mac OS X, or a Linux OS would in some way constitute ‘selling-out’.

Amigans appreciated the fact that a group of passionate people set out to create a new computing experience, because that passion was evident every time they used an Amiga, especially after periods of exposure to Windows PCs or Macs of the day. They do not raise these individuals to a higher station and recognise that contemporary products are made without much passion.

Amigaterians appreciated the fact that a group of passionate people set out to create a new computing experience, because that passion was evident every time they used an Amiga, especially after periods of exposure to Windows PCs or Macs of the day. They mistake minor feets of conviction and determination for passion in contemporary products and extol the individuals behind them.

Amigans don’t consider it blasphemy that in the years after 1994 other OS’s like BeOS, QNX, or Mac OS X have been compared to or even dubbed the next Amiga OS. Because for them the next Amiga OS doesn’t need to be backward compatible with OS 3.x 68k applications, it has nothing to do with ARexx, Datatypes, RAM Disk, or shared libraries.

Amigaterians consider any product that employs clearly identifiable Amiga OS 3.x inspiration or source code heredity as ‘Amiga OS like’ or the official next Amiga OS. To refer to or label any other product as such is sheer blasphemy and they’ll have none of it, no matter the degree of innovation, object structure, microkernel design, or user experience elegance.

Amigans understand why they used to use an Amiga, why they currently use Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, and why they would use the next platform that improved upon the ones they currently use. They are devoted to the idea of doing things better and smarter. They are not devoted to a particular platform.

Amigaterians have little understanding of why they still use an Amiga or persist with Amiga like modern constructs. No clear reasoning for their disdain for contemporary OS’s like Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, or even why in the current Amiga fragmented landscape they continue to be part of the problem and not part of the solution.

Amigans are future focused and have uncompromising standards.
Amigaterians are history focused and have uncompromising beliefs.

Back to the Question
You may have noticed that I question how one caters for the Amigan only. If it hasn’t become clearer thus far it is because plenty of cooking has already been done for the Amigaterian. Not employing any kind of market research the cooks have made a right royal mess of it, each catering for only a couple of the key points that matter to an Amigaterian.

In my attempt to better understand the needs of an Amigan I didn’t want to make the same mistake. When I started I wasn’t sure what the results would show. The two slightly overlapping bell curves have formed the basis for the above classification and codification. You might also be curious as to why the already catered for group are not labelled Amigans and the others Amigaterians. One of the key results of the research revealed that there are more Amigans than Amigaterians, and chronologically the Amigan came first, so I thought it only fair.

Though my market research was conducted for personal reasons and will not be published, some of my findings and insights I wanted to share with you here as I expect that they may amuse and enlighten others as they have done so for me.

Eddie Cejvan

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times; seem to be the sentiments amongst the polarised individuals that in some way, big or small, still maintain a connection to the Amiga, be it classic or NG.

Whom do you believe?
There are many who saturate the various online forums with spades of evidence that this is the best of times. Never has there been so much choice available to the non-conformist Amigan; From free and commercial emulation software, and the low cost commodity x86 and free open source AROS, through the flexible MorphOS, and all the way to the somewhat pricey Sam 4×0 PPC boards bundled with AmigaOS 4, and the coveted AmigaOne X1000.

Then there are just as many who reciprocate evidence to the contrary. They’ll cite precedents and personal experience to support their notion that this is the worst of times. Platform fragmentation, divided user loyalties, lack of medium-to-long term plans from…pretty much anyone, creating a dearth of uncertainty and an overexcited collective rumour gland that compounds the problem.

Friends, fellow Amigans, we have come a long way, we may not have all jumped aboard at the same port or harbour, but we’ve all arrived to the same predicament; too few survivors scattered across islands each being proclaimed as the new Amiga.

Enough metaphor, give it to me straight.
The state of the Amiga union is dire. When there are only a few thousand users left the worst thing that can happen is to have multiple choices, especially when there’s much dissimilarity between them. The user is unsure of where to invest their hard earned money and spare time, and a developer is unsure for which platform to develop. Not everyone lives in the first world and even if they did, not everyone can afford to invest their energy, money, and time in two or more of the various options.

Choice is good when there is a thriving ecosystem. It allows for new ideas to emerge, new entrants into the ecosystem, and cross-pollination. What the Amigans need is unity, a single choice, an easy choice. The liberating freedom of constraint.

What are you saying?
I’m not expecting that the respective camp sponsors unite and come-up with a comprehensive multi-year unification plan. Not impossible but highly improbable. I’m not expecting that all Amigans unite and support only a single of the many options out there and force the sponsors to unite with the user supported choice. I’d sooner start a cat herding business.

Then what?
Unfortunately, nothing. The situation right now resembles a defunct governing body, a democracy that is failing its citizens. All the factions are eager for your vote but neither of them has enough votes to form a majority government. Nothing gets decided, nothing gets resolved. And even the wealthier Amigans who support all the choices with their time and money (fence sitters) have but one favourite among them, the one they’d most want to see succeed. But any success in a broken system is only short-lived.

There is however hope.
Throughout history whenever participants of an ecosystem grow weary of their predicament, one action usually followed. Revolution.

What Amigans need, nay yearn for, is a revolution, more so than any other uniquely identifiable group of computer users. They need something and someone to lift them out of this quagmire, out of the inane choices between the squabbling factions of who has the rightful evolutionary claim and heredity to the proto species Computo amigensis. Like that even means anything after 16 or so years.

The state of the Amiga union is that there is no union. There is little hope of their ever being a union from the current stock. I’m not sure what shape the revolution will take or who will lead it, but I do know it isn’t any of the current factions. And I also know. that we’ll all instantly recognise it when it happens.

There is some really good coverage done by the guys over at Touch Arcade of the upcoming Amiga emulator for the iPhone OS platform.

I think the iPad makes an excellent retro gaming platform and am looking forward to getting one and playing some of my Amiga favourites. I’ll post my review here once I get a chance to play with it, stay tuned.

http://toucharcade.com/2010/04/19/manomio-demonstrates-amiga-and-atari-2600-emulators-for-iphone/