BARRETT@owl.ecil.iastate.edu (Marc Barrett) (03/11/90)
I, like anybody else here, am a dedicated Amiga user. I know as well as anybody how well-suited the Amiga is to the world of multimedia. The Amiga is the father of multimedia, yet it is getting little credit for it in any of the general computer and/or news magazines. Quite frankly, I am sick and tired of all the complaining Amiga users. Sure, it makes me sick, too, when the Amiga isn't even mentioned in an article about multimedia. But you have to see things on the side of the business magazines. There are over 20 times as many MACs and IBM PS/2 systems in use in the U.S. than Amiga systems. Commodore has done a very poor job (to say the least!!) of selling the Amiga in the U.S. There is a saying that "the Amiga sells itself because Commodore doesn't." How true this is. Unfortunately, the competition is gaining on the Amiga technologically, and the Amiga is becoming increasingly unable to sell itself. Since Commodore refuses to sell it, it doesn't sell. The tremendous numbers of MAC and IBM systems already in use more than outweighs any advantages the Amiga has over those machines in capabilities. If you were an owner of a business or head of a university department and wanted something to use for multimedia, would you use a system with a solid user-base and tremendous support, or one that very few people have heard of that has comparitively little support? You must also consider that magazines that do articles on multimedia only report what the know about. For the most part, the people who write these articles also know very little about the Amiga, so they can't write much about it. There is no compiracy in the media to deprive the Amiga of it's title as the premier machine for multimedia. It's just that it still isn't known well enough, or have a large enough installed base in the corporate market, for it to have an impact. BTW, don't give me that crap about there having been sold "over 1.3 million " Amiga systems. That figure is world-wide, and only about 15% of those systems are in the U.S. That adds up to about 200,000 Amiga systems in the U.S. -- very few indeed comparied to the millions of PS/2 and MAC systems.