Note from the Amiga R&D Team

Very interesting and active debate over the past two weeks. We *love*the passion of (most of ;-)) the on-line community. Linux? X- Windows?PCI? USB? MIDI? Floppy Drive? ATI graphics, etc., etc. While an overwhelmingpercentage of our email is quite positive about Amiga's directions, thereare those who have raised quite legitimate technical concerns, and a smallpercentage who are just bashing everything we do (more on them later).

One positive aspect of the Linux announcement is the huge influx oftechnical talent into the Amiga camp from the Linux community. There arelegitimate issues with Linux, as anyone with a technical background willacknowledge. One positive aspect of the Linux phenomenon is that thereare hundreds of thousands of programmers out there working to fix thoseproblems. There are also hundreds of companies working on applicationsand drivers (and hardware) for Linux, that we can immediately tap into.Yes, there are integration and testing issues to work on, but there aremany, many more positives than negatives. Please understand that the Linuxdecision was not purely (actually not mostly) a technical decision. Itwas a decision driven by a reasoned analysis of what underlying OS wouldgive Amiga the greatest chance to succeed in the marketplace, and as acompany.

Also understand that we have not yet seen a single technical issue raisedin the news groups that we are not already aware of, and working on eitherinside of Amiga or through partners. Will the Amiga MCC under developmentbe perfect? Of course not -- product development is all about tradeoffs.When it is shipping, will it be at the heart of the best distributed multimediacomputing environment in the marketplace in terms of price/performance/usability?Yes! Even more important, the MCC is only one piece of a much broader strategythat we have chosen to not really discuss yet. When Jim Collas talks aboutrevolutions, it's not a revolution in terms of what happens to be insidethe MCC box (although some of the unannounced components are, indeed, revolutionary);it's the entire distributed home computing/Internet environment and experiencethat will be revolutionary as it rolls out over the coming year. DON'TJUST FOCUS ON BOXES AND OPERATING SYSTEMS! (sorry for shouting.)

So, to those of you raising legitimate technical concerns, we will doour best to communicate solutions as they are worked out. Better yet, helpus track down those solutions. Linux is getting better every week, withissues getting resolved at an amazing pace. ATI may not be able to shiptheir new graphics/video accelerator (which looks great) on time, and restassured that we're also looking at 3dfx and NVidea. Yes, there will bea floppy drive (probably a 1.44MB / 120MB combo). We're working on thesound/MIDI requirements. We're listening to proactive suggestions, andwill do our best to manage the inevitable tradeoffs to create the bestnext-generation system we can.

To the small number of individuals who have been sending vulgar, threateninghatemail because you don't like what we're doing, and have announced thatyou're fed up and are leaving the Amiga community, goodbye. Millions andmillions of people will purchase Amiga-branded and Amiga-compliant productsover the coming years, and we're sorry you won't be among them.

Rick LeFaivre, Allan Havemose, and the Amiga R&D Team

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/