rjc@geech.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell) (03/15/91)
The following is my opinions based on what could be Commodore's future in my view. (howver warped it may be) Multimedia, and the Amiga's future ---------------------------------- Since 5 years ago, the Mac has made DeskTop Publishing popular. Who needs DeskTop publishing? Not everyone needs to publish a book or do layouts, or so they thought. By making quality Desktop Publishing cheap, the Mac has tapped a market that wasn't there before. Once again, a new form of media buzzwords have arrived. 'Desktop Video', 'Hypertext', and 'Multimedia' are just a few. In the flame wars lately, some people have said 'Not everyone needs animation, or video.' Do they? In the future, instead of publishing books on paper, your local library make offer books that contain an interactive video screen in them. Or they may offer discs that contain CD-I presentations of information you are looking for. I am attemping to postulate that there may not be a big market for Desktop Video now, but there may be in the future. Let's assume that I am right for a moment and that Desktop Video will become as common as Desktop Publishing. Let's review some reasons the Amiga may be the leader in this market. Computers come in all shapes and configurations, but usually software tends to be written for the 'lowest common denominator' of hardware. We all know the potential problems with this. If a computer's base hardware is too weak, the market becomes backlogged with 'backwards compatible' software that is written to support the lowest hardware configuration, which also happens to be where the biggest number of consumers are. When a computer contains specialized hardware in its smallest form, lots of software will take advantage of it. On the Atari ST, the MIDI port was the built in hardware, the results of this were that lots of music software was written for the Atari. On the Amiga, the built in animation, multitasking, and sound has triggered a plethora of paint, animation, titling, and presentation software to be written. Likewise, because of the competition between companies, this software has become refined over the years, and cheap. If any computer is positioned to become the leader in cheap, Desktop video , it's the Amiga. All Commodore has to do is, *advertise*. NewTek, creators of the Toaster, seem to know this, as they have been cruising across the country advertising at every major show from the very beginning. Notice, the Toaster has gained more recognition than the Amiga itself. Many people don't even know that you need an Amiga to use the Toaster.The Amiga is also being pitched as add-on hardware, rather than a real-computer. This is not a Mac flame, but many models of the Mac are not capable of Amiga style animation/multimedia. For this, you need the ability to do double or quadruple buffering, dma driven hardware, and multitasking. I'm not saying it can't be done on the Mac, of course it can. But it can't be done as easily on the Mac because of the extra hardware/CPU power required to do it. Don't get me wrong, Mac's are great for DTP.However I don't believe the Mac and Amiga are in direct competition. They are aiming for different markets entirely. Recently though, some Mac users as acting as if the Amiga can't do publishing. The Amiga doesn't have a large quantity of publishing software, coupled with the years of competition and production in DTP software to refine it, but the Amiga can do DTP/Word processing with a small selection of quality software that can only get better over time. At the moment, IBM/Microsoft seem to be twiddling their thumbs over DTV/Multimedia. DVI looks hopeful, but expensive. Microsoft has changed their 'definition' of multimedia several times over the last 2 years, so I'm kinda of confused where they stand. The Amiga's future is somewhat fuzzy, but if the last few months are any indicator, it seems to be getting better. Stock is up over 200%, profits have quadupled, CDTV is to be released next week, the Amiga 3000, along with Unix was finished, the Toaster became reality, and 24bit boards seem to be popping up all over the place. // // Only the Amiga makes it possible. \X/