| [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
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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 103 of 132 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by gary_c on 18-Oct-2002 14:08 GMT | In reply to Comment 102 (Anonymous):
anonymous (losing cred right off the bat) wrote:
> 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"
Posts that start "let me explain" almost always end up being 90 bs. Nevertheless, I guess that would "especially" Be's fanatical worshippers. Not being one anyway, I'll let the slip pass.... Of course it's obvious that "I like" doesn't equal "it's profitable." A truism. If you think I'm functioning on that level, it's no wonder your arguments are as they are.
> 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.
You've got a knack for stating the obvious. No, there's no profit in selling a product that costs more to produce than it earns. Was this Be, Inc.'s intention? Of course not. Was it the position they found themselves in? Yes. They wouldn't need to ask Microsoft or Apple, who aren't particularly more capable of laying this obvious factoid on them than any other going concern. But whatever. I'm still waiting to read something meaty in your post.
> 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)
Unsuspecting? I don't know what your awareness was at the time, but everybody I knew who was buying BeOS then knew *exactly* what they were getting. It was a geeks' OS marketed to geeks, not something for Joe Sixpack to pick up at Circuit City.
> 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.
Again, this was clear to virtually every potential customer because of how Be was marketing the product. It was something like buying MorphOS or AmigaOS4 will be. Pity the poor soul who doesn't know what he's buying, because the product will have such limitations compared to Windows or MacOS and their available applications. So to repeat, the status of BeOS was well known to the people who were interested enough to investigate it. The buyers may have complained that particular hardware wasn't supported, for example, but the rest of us on BeUserTalk, etc. pointed out the clearly displayed compatibility list at www.be.com, which every buyer was pleaded with to check before purchasing.
> 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.
Sounds plausible enough. I wonder what would have been a better course....
> 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!
Needless to say, that's the way a lot of companies operated at the time. There's always the hope that at some point sales will begin to ramp up and start covering the overhead. This, as you say, is basic business. But you also have to keep in mind what we might call extenuating circumstances. Namely that Microsoft explicitly moved to lock Be out of the OEM market, something that they were called on by the DOJ. But by then it was water under the bridge. I'd say that under those circumstances, Be's success would have required more than sound business management. More like something biblical.
> Despite the R&D spending, BeOS was still missing many features from its core a(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.
This is a rather spotty description of BeOS. I don't really know why you've listed those particular things. Only stereo sound? I guess you, knowledgeable as you are on the subject, are aware of the fact that Steinberg, among others, was readying a port to BeOS. Apparently they didn't see the limitations you're describing. Only one contiguous desktop display? Well, it has workspaces. Maybe not multi-monitor support, but then I don't suppose that was a high priority, given the more fundamental things to get out of the way first. No 3d acceleration. True, that was coming at the time of the Focus Shift. Screensaver? Now there's a program that definitely should be at the top of any OS vendor's priority list. Screensavers are totally frivolous, not needed by modern monitors. BTW, the BeOS Matrix screensaver is the best on any platform, as you've no doubt also realized, as long as were discussing pointless applications. And, yes, the project was losing Be millions. Uh, it was a project in development; that's how it works.
> 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.
Yes, in retrospect, but that wasn't structural, it was a result of the unique circumstances Be found itself in (a little hard to predict Apple's clone-killing and the pervasiveness of Microsoft's control of OEM companies, for example). I agree that Be made bad management decisions along the way, or at least ones that I and a number of other people at the time argued with. But this isn't to say that their product wasn't fundamentally viable, only that the way Be pursued its development and marketing weren't up to the job.
-- gary_c |
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