Getting the Pegasos Market Going!

This is a message for traditional “Amiga Community” Resellers…

Since our involvement and the earliest threats against MorphOS, we have had German and European experts checking the applicable law. If fact, in spite of the latest threats, we are looking forward to the timely release of MorphOS.

A word about the past: the spirit of “Amiga” rose from the demise of Commodore with what was an incredibly well designed and functional operating system. It became one of the first examples of "forward compatibility." A word about the present: MorphOS is ready to take the first step to co-exist with this internationally appreciated example of software engineering that has generated a distinctive Community of Users, Developers and Resellers.

We would like to address our potential Resellers. What will be our future relationship with you? Well, we tried one approach. It worked for the Linux market, but not for your market. Nearly all of you wanted the same thing – a Pegasos running MorphOS to test. You will have that now. You can buy one this week or next month, or whenever they want. There will be many available soon. You will find MorphOS for the PPC is something new. Before, MorphOS was a kernel, which ran on the PPC, but required AmigaOS files to be able to run Amiga applications. Now it is different. MorphOS is the complete core of the Pegasos and can function as a complete operating system. No additional files are required to achieve this. To be completely clear, what MorphOS is today is not what “MorphOS” was before (and what is still available today online). MorphOS today is different. It is a great accomplishment and a credit to Ralph Schmidt and his team to have MorphOS where it is today, but that will not stop us from making it better. You won’t be wasting your time and effort when you begin to sell these machines.

We have decided that while there was a Community suave enough to handle the Pegasos and MorphOS as it was, the regular computer user was not, and frankly initially, neither were the Resellers. Our original concept did not work well. We had only one reseller in this Community order ten boards until two weeks ago when we had three more place orders (two of them for a very decent size), but this was slow enough in coming that we understood we needed to take another approach. We sent back their money or did not accept it. We had a bad dream about an OS based website dedicated to The Best 100 Bug Fixes -- have you heard of that before? We woke up.

Ladies and Gentleman, we need to remember that the target is regular computer users, who are “new” users and who represent new markets for this Community. A little economic success could improve plenty of things around here – for Developers, for Resellers, and ultimately for Users themselves – so we decided MorphOS needed to be ready for them…. and you. That is why there will be a few steps.

Step One: The “Betatester” with MorphOSv.90
Step Two: Pegasos with MorphOSv1.0
Step Three: The Pegasos Handheld with MorphOSv1.0+

But, in this post we will stick to our Resellers and our message to them. We will come back to Developers and Team Betatester after this weekend in Bordeaux at the SLACH PARTY. Later, we will describe in detail our hardware plans here and all the peripherals we plan on introducing. We have plenty of things to share and we will do it here on www.morphos-news.de

The cost of the Pegasos will fall in the next production runs. We will keep optimizing and as we do there will be more profit to carved up. Right now, we are just spending money. Releasing a product with no strings attached that is not ready for a “regular computer user” is commercial suicide. We cannot afford to do that, but we need to begin to cover our investment and we need to take a straight line to the commercial /regular consumer release point. We need to get going!

So, here is our promise to our Resellers: we will have a product you can release to “regular computer users" in December. We intend to fully support the computer show being planned in Aachen that month. We will not only have an operating system to release, but a few applications, including a game that will surprise even the normal fans.

Just to make sure that is clear:

We will ship Pegasos boards to all Resellers by 2 December 2002, if not before.

If you have comments or questions you can email us at bbrv@thendic-france.com

We will also present our Pegasos Handheld Prototype in December!

Keep your eyes on this site for the latest updates!

Best regards,

Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck