Transitions
by Eric Schwartz
from the AmiTech-Dayton Gazette, May 2003
Greetings folks! I've been thinking a little about the odd little transitional phase the Amiga world is in --- either from the last generation to the next, or from some market to none. There's a lot of ill feeling between the camp of Genesi/PegasOS/MorphOS, and the Eyetech/Hyperion/Amiga One group, better known as the "bearers of the name." Currently, while both competing factions both have at least their first revisions of hardware out and for sale, MorphOS seems to have the inside track, as their Amiga-ish operating system is available to the public, while Amiga OS version 4 still has a (hopefully short) ways to go. Some people are staunch believers in Pegasos/Morph, others see it as not a successor to the Amiga legacy, mostly because there is no Amiga name attached. Still others prefer to wait until all options are ready for prime time, wanting to touch, taste and smell both before coming to any kind of decision. Others yet may use any of these reasons as an excuse not to get anything, or become a Windows user with a hobbyist interest in Amiga emulation. It boils down to the fact that many people who could aren't buying, even with a few viable options currently available.
Truth be told, many people have turned away from the Amiga. It only makes sense considering how long the platform has stood still in the area of technology. A surprising number of people have stuck around however, perhaps against better judgment. For the longest time we've been able to hold something over the heads of the Windows and Mac users, be it graphics or sound or multitasking or efficiency. As time moves on, there's less to brag about. Pretty much every garden variety Windows PC or Macintosh easily bests nearly all Amigas in raw power, graphics and sound ability, and hardware availability. With years of work to get things right, other systems are beginning to look more reliable, and even some of the fringe operating systems, such as Be or QNX, offer similar levels of capability for similarly tiny amounts of RAM and disk space. So what does the Amiga offer that keeps people hanging around? Everyone knows "Amiga" stands for "friend," and more often than not it still rings true. People don't like to switch from a platform they are used to, and the Amiga doesn't do nearly as much annoying crap as many others. The Amiga doesn't expect you to be a programming guru, nor does it expect to make all your decisions for you. The Amiga doesn't scold you if you turn it off without going through a shut-down procedure first. The Amiga doesn't make you pause for the memory-disk paging to do its thing. The Amiga doesn't need you to tell it you've inserted a floppy disk, or tell it to spit it out. No machine is perfect, of course, but some things may have a greater claim to the word than others, at least in terms of customer satisfaction.
One thing that hasn't been lost on many people is that the Amiga's successor, be it an AmigaOne running Amiga OS4, or a PegasOS running MorphOS, is that it's an almost completely new machine from the ground up. The only things in common with the Amigas we know are names, philosophies, compatibility, and look and feel in various degrees. I can see why people want to experience one or both of these machines for themselves before committing any of their hard-earned money. Sure, they might close the gap for horsepower, but is it the "Amiga" they've been wanting, or just some PC with an Amiga-ish veneer on it? Add to this the ubiquitous uncertainty for which path, Amiga or Morph, will be more successful, or if either will have any success at all. We sit and wait, hoping that the right decision for the future will present itself to us on a platter. Unfortunately while we wait, the dollars we aren't spending aren't making anyone a success, which makes any decisions we might make that much further away. "Wait and see" is a very harmful attitude to have in a world such as ours.