Yawn!
by Ron Schwartz
from the AmiTech Dayton Gazette, April 2003
The excitement continues to grow in the Amiga World, yeah! right! Yawn! Actually there was one little piece of news I saw that I thought was very interesting. One of the first user groups to form officially in this country for the Morph/Pagasos system has formed in Snoqualme, Washington. Gee, that name sounds very familiar. Where have I heard that before? Oh! Yeah! That's right! That's where the headquarters for that other company is. Let's see. What's its name? Oh yeah, Amiga. Inc. It seems a bit odd that one of the initial Morph user groups would form in Amiga's home town. Kind of makes you wonder how many of the user group members are employees of Amiga, Inc.
Let's see, if the name of the group is the Snowqualme Morph User Group, then it must be "SMUG," right?
Actually, it seems each month I keep predicting that things are ready to burst and things will start to happen and each month it doesn't happen. I suppose that's not really true. The marketing of both the Amiga One and Pegasos motherboards and MorphOS began back before the first of the year. Part of the problem has been that both motherboards were being manufactured by MAI Logic and were modified versions of the PPC based Linux motherboard that MAI markets as the Teron PPC and is also marketed by Terre Soft as the Boxer ATX. There turned out to be some problems with one of the chip sets on the board and, as I understand it, has fostered a parting of the ways. Initially, the problem appeared on the Amiga One and it was thought to be taken care of until it resurfaced on the Pegasos boards. Further action is being taken to resolve the problem in the long run, but this was the catalyst that encouraged Pegasos to look elsewhere. Therefore a limited number of the Pegasos I boards will be sold until the new Pegasos II boards become available. Pegasos II will be a redesigned board and will come from a new supplier, a circuit board manufacturer who will be making its first foray into providing full motherboards. They are also promising to provide a trade-up for anyone who purchases a Pegasos I to move to a Pegasos II.
I have heard a rumor that MAI may pull out of the business, and another that Eyetech has not been satisfied with the level of sales of the Amiga One and may scrap it, but I have not been able to confirm that on any of the web sites I frequent. Then again, one of our members has just received a prototype of new Mini ATX board from MAI that is apparently a reduced version of these systems. So, your guess is as good as mine as to what is really going on.
It is rather unfortunate that, at a time when these new products are being introduced and need sales to make them viable products to insure the solvency of their developers, these situations encourage most of us to adopt a wait and see attitude. Many of us will wait until the products are generally available so we can see them, experiment with them, compare them with the alternatives and only when we have reasonable confidence in our decision, proceed to purchase. Unfortunately, with a market as small as the current Amiga Community, having the market fragmented is bad enough, but if major parts of that market also delay making purchases, it may well doom the new product lines before they are well underway.