Editorial

With AmigaOS4.0 beta having been released to the closed beta list (click here for some third-party screenshots), the end of almost ten years of waiting is now in sight for the Amiga community. An incredible effort by developers, dealers and users has demonstrated just why there is nothing quite like the Amiga platform and soon, we will all be able to show off what makes us special, AmigaOS4.0 on an AmigaOne on sale to the public.

Once the parades have died down however, we have to look to the future. The software roadmap itself is already laid out, with some known and some unknown parts, and quite a few surprises as well. Hardware wise, we have a similar tale. Success of a platform though is not just down to hardware and software. It is to a large extent down to the marketing of that platform and, in particular, to increasing the size of the community to a point at least where small to mid sized development houses consider the Amiga platform a commercially viable prospect and start developing new applications for it.

Marketing is often confused with sales as a function because the two work closely together but marketing is a much more pervasive discipline. It has to do with looking outside the window at the world, identifying trends, building requirement sets, creating possible product and service descriptions, selling them to senior management, working with the engineering teams to create the products and then priming, launching, evangelising, supporting and developing the success of those products.

Tech heads are often suspicious of marketing, and rightly so because at its worse it leads to the 'Style over Substance' approach to business. However great technology is useless if the company making it goes bankrupt because the world wasn't ready for it or it looks like a constipated vacuum cleaner.

For Amiga, marketing will be crucial over the next twelve months. We are in a strange position. Our market and community has shrunken considerably, most likely to a point below commercial viability for any but the smallest developers and yet we are about to launch a new operating system to go with a brand new computer that is not price competitive with the mainstream PC offerings.

Gut feeling is that we need to take the new platform and promote it like hell to the mainstream, banking on fond reminiscences and disillusionment with the Wintel factory farm approach. That should create enough interest to develop a market of perhaps fifty to a hundred thousand which will provide commercial viability for enough developers to see the platform advance. In the meantime, we push forwards with embedded offerings, STBs, kiosks and the like, hoping for a nice big deal that will set us up for some internally driven expansion.

Marketing however will tell you that this igut feeling is the nitrous oxide approach - a big bang to be followed in the medium term by the engine falling apart. Why? Ah, that's the point of this article.

We have a good platform. Solid foundations, new hardware but still in need of major renovation. We have a small but passionate and vibrant community that will hopefully embrace AmigaOS4.0 and the AmigaOne. This is our first toehold as we seek to climb back up the cliff to the top.

The mainstream market is something different entirely. It is not full of people who base their choice of computer on whether it runs a particular operating system or uses a particular processor. Most are not au fait with the latency inherent in the task switching algorithm or the profile of cache flushing during an MPEG decode. The mainstream buy a computer because it allows them to do a set of activities. This in part stems from the fact that the success of Microsoft in particular has led to computing becoming a transparent activity. People don't 'use the computer' anymore. Instead they 'do their email' or 'browse the web' or 'view their pictures' or 'play a game'. When a device or implement starts to become a commodity, it shrinks below the conscious surface and in this lies the opportunity
that any marketer will tell you can show us the way forwards, and up that cliff. Those of you patience or bored enough to have followed my other columns will know that Amiga is big on the idea of digital living. Digital living is where the most important element is the relationship between a user and their resources and services set, applied in the virtual domain. In this, activity based operation is the natural way of doing things.

What this means for Amiga therefore is that if we are to be able to offer a compelling alternative in the mainstream then we have to be able to service those activity requirements. If we don't then once the initial wave of excitement over the relaunched Amiga dies down, the platform will founder and fail. Game consoles that ship with too few games, music formats with too few titles and beer without flavour can leap forwards on marketing, hearsay and rumour but once the cold light of day can break onto those products, there is nowhere to hide.

If we are honest with ourselves, most of us do understand this only too well. I haven't played a game on my Amiga for over a year. I use MS Office because most of the documents I get require it. It is a royal pain to try to use my digital camera with the Amiga. Activities. Activities. Activities. If I can't do them on my Amiga then, in the end, why would anyone else chose to buy an Amiga?

At Amiga Inc, we have started a project in which we are assessing what we call the "digital living essentials" - those activities which is the reason that the majority of people buy and use a computer in the first place. It is our belief that if we can provide world class solutions to 80% of those activities, then we will be able to go into the mainstream and sell, without being laughed out of the market place.

What we intend to do is create a list of the most important digital activities - not just by Amigans when they use their Amigas, but when using any digital device. When we have this list, we will then sort it into priority order and work will begin on creating those solutions, to be included in later versions of AmigaOS4. It is not our intention to push third parties out of the running, and indeed we will consult and work with them, and ensure that our solutions are broken into resources and services that they and other third party developers can use in constructing their products. However Amiga now considers that it is in the business not just of operating systems but of digital living solutions and anything that is essential to those solutions is our business.

This is nothing new, nor is it one of our 'big ideas'. Apple have already done something similar with their iTunes, iMovies, iCal, iPhoto application set. We would have done it first if we'd had the money and Gateway would have listened, but that's water under the bridge.

I will start by saying that gaming, whilst something I and many others consider an essential part of digital living will not be included because these are quite rightly the domain of third parties. They will not form part of this project,

This brings me neatly to a large favour I have to ask. In order to get the best possible information on what these digital living essentials may be, we want to conduct a survey of you, the CAM readers. We have set up a web form that is accessible only via your AmiPASS account on os.amiga.com. This form asks that each person assign 100% to the listed digital activities. Quite simply we want you to assign a percentage-wise importance on these activities. Again I repeat that this isn't about your Amiga team (unless you use your Amiga for every digitial activity you do). We'll have a follow up article next issue on the results and will consider their implications.

Click here to start the survey

[Note: Since the time of this issue's release, we have modified the survey and instead of assigning weights based on a time-scale usage, we would like you to rate based on importance. If anyone would like to re-take the survey, please email the webmaster.]

Once we push ourselves into the mainstream, we will become visible for miles around, a Ferrari gliding through a set of Trabants. We will not take that drive however until we believe we are ready to stand up to the extreme scrutiny and, of course the comparisons with our competitors - Windows, Linux and OS X. As with most things in life, you only get one shot at a first impression and we have got to have everything perfect for that moment when we step out.