The Future? (Part the First)

There's a lot of talk around here about "the future of the Amiga." Many opinions are expressed on the subject, and I've shot off my mouth on the subject more than once. What I want to do here is lay out, for the record, exactly what I think about all this.

The Amiga is not dead.
Some people have taken to saying that the Amiga is dead. This is not true. Nothing is dead that has a following. It is not dead as a commercial product, either - nothing is dead as a commercial product if people are still willing to pay money for it. That does not necessarily mean that it's strong enough to support a full-scale manufacturing enterprise, just that it's not dead.

There can still be new Amiga or Amiga-like hardware.
Many people saying "Amiga is dead" seem to be using it as shorthand for "there will never be a new Amiga platform, give up on ever seeing that happen." (These people would seem to be ignoring the existence of Minimig, but presumably they have a reason by which that "doesn't count.")

Look, I understand that the Amiga community has been burned more than once in the past, and it's understandable that people would get jaded. That doesn't make their ultra-cynicism an accurate predictor of future events. I'm not saying this as some wide-eyed naif - I know that getting a product off the ground requires a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (not to mention money,) and that's exactly why a lot of new platforms, upgrades, or programs die in development.

But that still doesn't mean it's not possible. It's been done on a small scale many times in many parts of the retrocomputing community - look at the N8VEM project, or the MSX upgrades from SuperSoniqs. Tech-industry juggernauts? Of course not. But they are real products that really work and that you can obtain for your very own. This can still happen for the Amiga.

It will not be a cross-market blockbuster success.
This, however, is the problem: to what seems to be a great many Amigans, little projects like that "don't count" because they're little projects. Never mind that that's exactly why they're feasible in the first place, that the effort and overhead required for a small-scale production effort is far lower than the cost of setting up a mass-production arrangement, they want their new Amiga big.

A distressing number of people in the community seem to suffer from this inferiority complex. It's kind of the exact opposite of what Apple fans were going through in the '90s - where Mac die-hards adopted an attitude of "screw you ignorant masses, my computer is cooler and I don't care that it's hemorrhaging money and rapidly losing market share," many Amiga fans seem to have adopted an attitude of "oh, we'll never take back the market, let's not even bother, it's doomed to fail."

What the hell kind of attitude is that? Since when is any product that's not a massive cross-market juggernaut automatically a failure? It's reminiscent of modern Hollywood, where any movie that isn't a box-office Goliath becomes a "couldn't really care one way or the other" proposition, and movies that don't make back twice their budget in the first two weeks become total anathema. When did niche markets become a mark of shame?

Market share cannot be purposefully induced.
Probably part of the thinking with that is that a new Amiga totally could take back the market, if only X, Y, and Z criteria were met. Surely the Amiga enlightenment could not be stopped, if only this were the case! Unfortunately, the lesson of history is that in the end, any matter that depends on the actions and interactions of a large number of people (as does market share) pretty much comes down to the luck of the draw.

The best tech does not always win. We in the Amiga community should know that, because that's exactly what happened with the Amiga. At the time of its release, it was at least a decade ahead of the competition - in 1985 the Mac was still a monochrome-only machine with a single-tasking OS that was only just beginning to be kludged up to support multitasking at all, and Microsoft was making a complete fool of itself touting the utter joke that was Windows 1.0 while PC users ignored them and stuck with DOS. Were the computer industry really the meritocracy that we'd like to think it is, the Amiga would have stomped them flat.

But that didn't happen, and instead of recognizing that sometimes bad things happen to good machines, Amigans like to point the finger at Commodore's marketing department or invent industry-wide Microsoft-led conspiracies. Sure, Commodore's corporate ineptitude didn't help, and everybody knows about the strong-arm tactics MS used to get their OSes bundled with every single PC sold, but nobody was forcing the public to buy PCs. As it is most of the time, it was largely just chance.

But the best-marketed tech doesn't always win, either. Apple is a prime example - they've been marketing experts from day one of the Mac's existence, but they spent the 1990s bleeding money and losing market share despite their efforts. The cheapest tech doesn't always win, or one of the cheapo "appliance computer" attempts of the early 2000s would have taken over. The simple fact is that market share is something that happens, not something you can create. You can nurture and grow it, if you know what you're doing and are responsive to user input without going so far as to dance at their whim, but you can't make it happen.

And that's why it's foolish to measure success in terms of taking back the market. We never had it in the first place, and we can't just take it back through force of will, technological superiority, or anything else. We need to get over this massive inferiority complex - whatever a new Amiga should be, let it be that, and the hell with the rest of the industry. Maybe fortune will smile on the effort, maybe not, but in the long run we'll be a lot happier with a good but niche product than we will with a product that abandons the things that make the Amiga special in an attempt to storm the industry.