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Originally Posted by antonvaltaz
But then Apple aimed for - and quickly achieved - dominance in a particular professional sphere, ie. print and design. What could have been Amiga's niche - desktop video? In that arena it was always seen as a cheap-and-cheerful alternative to SGI workstations and the like: not a very prestigious position.
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homevideo certainly, also DPaint was widely used for kind of game-development for a long time. Alot of 3D-Rendering packages began its live on the Amiga aswell.
So it was suited well in realtime multimedia niches, and during its life it had good programs for practically any purpose (including DTP). Some of those programs came to late and weren't really pushed - which falls back to Commodore again, they just did nothing.
A complete, affordable Office Suite would've gone a long way on making Amiga viable for business and general users and having its unique strengths on top.
Quote:
Originally Posted by antonvaltaz
I also don't buy the argument that people use the best available technology. People are stubborn idiots: they like to use what they know, even if there are better alternatives. Plus there would have been substantial costs involved in businesses changing IT platform, after significant investment. It was never going to happen.
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It did happen and still does, servers did change from dominantly RISC platform to x86 end of the 90s, and alot did migrate between OS`s several times.
I dont know why you bring up that "big-business" again, let the servers and accounting run on IBM-PC for all I care. That still leaves out tons of space for CAD, games/video/multimedia, DTP which Amiga was in a better position to tackle. And then theres the home-user market aswell, which wasnt really absorbed by the IBM-PC until Win95, and how lively and productive it was is documented by Aminet. DOS and Win3.1 sucked colossal amounts of manure, even if thats not enough to make big conservative companies converts overnight, its more than enough to consider alternatives for new or technological driven companies.
Its still a big bag of "ifs", but the main issue is that the Amiga sold quite good through "word of mouth" alone, what was lacking is marketing and push in the professional space.
Also, in the long term the Amiga would have to become more "modular", ie. being able to take standard Gfx/Sound Cards. This was realized by Commodore before they went under, but never fully materialized in the OS. Apart from the chipset, the Amiga already was a bunch of commodity parts, so arguable even if it would've survived it would look alot like IBM-PC`s today.