From:             Martin Baute solar@baud.de
To:               team@amiga-news.de
Date:             Tue, 14 Sep 1999 20:12:43 +0200
Subject:          Open Letter to Tom Schmidt
Voller Name:      Martin Baute
Homepage:         http://www.baud.de/public/members/solar.html

Dear Sir,

we are the Amiga community. We are a community of people brought together
by a very different kind of computing, which survived despite the gravest
of circumstances, beyond bancrupty, beyond despair, beyond obsoletion.

The community survived because there was hope, and little alternative.

We look at the market of home, personal, and office computing, and we see
bloated, inefficient, unreliable systems that offer little "feeling" to
the power user, and much irritation to the beginner.

So we dared to hope, that one day there would be a computing alternative
available again to the masses, one that made computing fun again for
everyone, not only for the elusive few who actually like to modify arcane
registry entries or .rc lines.

And our hopes, for long, and sometimes very dark years, were on the brand
named "Amiga", because this brand - rather, the philosophy and spirit it
stood for - embodied what we liked in computing.

We have seen many changes at the helm, even more changes in direction.

And every time again, ever since EsCom times up to the latest ongoings at
Amiga Inc., whenever there was a change at helm or a change in direction,
we feared.

Our fear always was the same. Will there be an Amiga computer we can
buy, to sit on our desks at home or in the office?

There has always been talk about Set-Top-Boxes. In more recent times,
there is talk about "information appliances".

But what the community anxiously waits for, always has waited for when
the winds of change were blowing, is not about Set-Top-Boxes, not about
"information appliances". I do not want to critizise, to the contrary.
There are evolving markets out there waiting to be explored, and it is
a good feeling that Amiga might be among the spearhead of explorers to
this market.

However, for us, the existing, living, starving community scattered all
around the world, for the distributors, developers, vendors, users, for
us, it is the desktop we most anxiously wait for.

Yes, there certainly is a mass market for Set-Top-Boxes and information
appliances, and the Amiga Inc. concept for a pervasive home network is
a nice one for sure. But all this is not what the brand "Amiga" promises
to us.

To make a long story short, to ask the question so vital for motivation,
faith, and hope for many of us, I ask you:



- Do the plans at Amiga Inc., which you told us will be followed
  through, still include a home/personal computer product range similar
  or at least alike to the "Multimedia Convergence Computer" previously
  presented by Amiga Inc.?
  Manufactured by Amiga Inc. itself, or by third party manufacturers?

  (Means, will we see hardware as revolutionary as your software
  technology, or will we share the fate of BeOS, fine OS without
  own plattform?)

- And will it be presented anywhere near to the original time scale
  (1st quarter 2000)?



A question so simple, but of utmost importance for those who look at
Amiga Inc. today. Those looking at Amiga tomorrow might be satisfied
by Set-Top-Boxes and "information appliances".

We are not. Scatter our fears.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

With kindest regards,
--
    Martin Baute          /// Amiga A1200 Towerhawk - PowerPC 603e / MC68060
 => solar@baud.de <=     /// Newsmaster - English:  http://www.amiga-news.de
Member of Team AMIGA \\\/// Member of the Bielefeld Amiga Users & Developers
100% Microsoft free!  \XX/ Maintainer of Version Watch: http://www.vwatch.de

Amiga - The Last Line of Defense.
-- www.baud.de



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