[News] AmigaOne to be demo'd THIS Sunday for first time in Australia! | ANN.lu |
Posted on 17-Oct-2002 00:11 GMT by Cyberwlf | 132 comments View flat View list |
As the title says, the Australian debut of the AmigaOne, the final hardware, will be demonstrated this Sunday in Sydney, Australia. So come along and check it out at ....
AmigaOne Australian Debut
You're invited!
Sydney Amiga User Group and Anything Amiga (www.anythingamiga.com.au) present, the AmigaOne Australian Debut.
Want to be one of the first in Australia to get a look at the new AmigaOne ...................
Well come along...
SAUG Website
DATE: Sunday October 20th
TIME: 2pm
LOCATION: Epping Community Centre, (School of Arts building), 9 Oxford Street, Epping NSW.
If your Sydney based or close enough to get there then see the
following.
This coming Sunday the Sydney Amiga User Group in conjunction with user group member Ross Vumbaca and AnythingAmiga will debut the new AmigaOne.
So come along and see the first new Amiga hardware in many
years ............ and join SAUG while your there.
For more information on the Sydney Amiga User Group please visit: http://welcome.to/SAUG.
For those that can't make it a full run down on the event will be posted on the net via our website as soon as possible after the days activities in both text and mpeg video format.
So if you can make it we will see you all there this coming Sunday !!!!
If not we will post links to where you can see it on the net. !!
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AmigaOne to be demo'd THIS Sunday for first time in Australia! : Comment 102 of 132 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Anonymous on 18-Oct-2002 10:10 GMT | In reply to Comment 82 (gary_c): "Sorry, but you're jumping to conclusions. BeOS was Be, Inc.'s only source of income, other than venture capital, for quite awhile. In fact, analysts got nervous when Be started giving BeOS away, dumping its only income stream, in order to drop support for it and concentrate on BeIA for OEM deals. It's entirely plausible that BeOS could have been a viable commercial product if Be (or its financers -- hard to know who's at fault) had the patience to build a market incrementally rather than only swinging for the homerun."
It's not hard to know at all because unlike the Amiga companies we're discussing Be Inc. were a public company, the books are open.
Let me explain it slowly and clearly because it seems even Be's fanatical worshippers never understood why "I like this OS" != "This OS is profitable"
Be Inc. sold software, not hardware. So in order to make a profit they had to bring in more income from software sales than they spent in R&D, marketing and overheads. If they'd asked, Microsoft and Apple would have told them that this won't work, but obviously JLG wouldn't have believed MS and Apple even though he had previously _worked_ at Apple.
Be Inc. spent up to $10 million per year on R&D, building an entire OS over about a decade. It seems easy to recover this cost, just sell a $100 OS to one million users and you're at break even. Unfortunately BeOS R4.5 (the first version Be really attempted to sell to unsuspecting users) was interesting but ultimately not a satisfactory replacement for MacOS or Windows. Driver support was poor, the OS was missing many important features and there were very few applications available.
So what did Be Inc. do? They spent more money on R&D. They wrote more drivers, they worked hard to get app developers interested (giving away lots of copies of the OS to anyone claiming "developer" status) and they started to implement more of the features users would commonly recognise as "essential" to the OS.
The next version of BeOS sold better, but nowhere near enough to cover the increased R&D expenses. Users demanded /more/ driver support and /better/ OS features, and /more/ applications. ie they demanded an increase in R&D spending. It doesn't take a degree in any finance related subject to see where this was leading. Spend $10 million on R&D, get $1 million income. Spend $50 million on R&D, get $5 million income. You can lose any amount of money you like this way!
Despite the R&D spending, BeOS was still missing many features from its core (e.g. it supported only stereo sound, only one contiguous desktop display, had no 3D acceleration) compared to the established alternatives. In fact it only had a /screensaver/ because that was donated by a user and this OS was losing Be Inc. millions of dollars per year.
Analysts were right to be anxious when Be Inc. dumped BeOS, because it showed that the company was founded on a bad bet. That doesn't mean the company couldn't be saved, but more importantly it doesn't mean that dumping BeOS was a bad move. No matter how much _income_ it generated, BeOS consistently lost money. |
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