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Janne
| | Keskiviikkona, 7. tammikuuta, 2004 - klo 10.48: | |
Loistava analyysi mielestäni.
On Monday, Jan 5, 2004, Gregg wrote:
> > On Monday, Jan 5, 2004, gary_c wrote:
>
>
>
> > I think
> > Genesi has been disappointed with Pegasos sales in this market, so their
> > expectations here have been reduced.
>
> Really? I was of the impression that demand was higher than production, and
> I can't believe they ever thought of the Amiga market as being a
> significant consumer base anyway. My understanding is that there has been
> less demand outside this vestigial market than they had hoped (recalling
> trumpeting of "millions of units" deals for set-top boxes or such).
Genesi already has a settop box design which was poised to sell "millions of units" in a few European countries. This is a little different to "installed on 2 million PDA units by the end of 2002", in that the Genesi design exists 
Bill even encouraged people to call ahead and then go visit bPlan, and see the settop box prototype. The Pegasos II, crunchbox, blade servers, settops, Eclipsis, G5 desktop, all products which have been through certain amounts of planning but are now all based on a fundamentally simple and common design (simply add and remove select components as you see fit for target market: settops don't need slots, Eclipsis can do away with legacy ports and gain PCMCIA or miniPCI, blah blah blah)
The entire problem for Genesi so far has been: they banked on Articia S, and it didn't work out. Now new solutions have opened themselves up (which rather pleasingly would never have been available using the Articia - Marvell and IBM are much more friendly) and are going forwards quickly on the way to final solutions and sales!
> > I'm a little concerned that rather than leverage the support they have here,
> > they'll just jettison everything in pursuit of new markets
>
> I think it would be unwise at several levels to do this; while the desire
> to disentangle themselves from the lunatic fringe is entirely understandable,
Bill Buck withdrawing from certain news sites just means he finally got fed up of being treated like a worthless puddle of slime by a bunch of ungrateful ignorant fuckheads. After all his company has done, 99% of the stuff he hears every day is some kind of personal slur, people leaving disturbing voice mails, dredging up stuff that happened 10 years ago (VIScorp) which is barely relevant anymore and especially has been personally resolved (e.g. Carl Sassenrath doesn't give a toss about stuff that happened 10 years ago and is on very good terms with Genesi), plus a new batch of people attempting to (wrongly) attach a major tax fraud to him.
If I was treated like that by MY customers, I'd stop paying attention to them, and not be so concerned of keeping them abreast of developments too, short of actually telling them to go fuck themselves
Genesi aren't going to disengage from the Amiga market. While there are still Amigans who want to run MorphOS, Genesi are held in even by tiny threads. The point is now that to actually make money, rather than restrict themselves to the Amiga brand name, or clones thereof, such as other companies will have to be content to do, they should go out and try the real world instead.
Yes, this was probably the plan all along. Even 5 years ago when Gerald and Thomas first started work on the Pegasos, they didn't have millions of customers in the Amiga community, despite what Bill McEwen spread about his websites.
According to Bill Buck on morphos-news.de, to maintain in terms of running costs for Genesi, the Pegasos II needs to sell 25,000 units per month.
This isn't going to happen, and never was going to happen, in the Amiga market. Note that this probably isn't *all* costs (no development etc.) but just the money required to employ all those people, rent all those offices, hire those production facilities, and pack cardboard boxes for shipping via UPS! Research & development is usually a business write-off, if only for tax purposes
25,000 units a month is unobtainable even in the real world too - Apple barely sell 150,000 units per quarter of Mac hardware, most of their costs are made by such cute things as charging $129 for an OS *upgrade*, selling MP3 players and AAC-encoded audio, and overpricing RAM.
This is why the Guardian costs more like $5000 (sell one of those, and you need to sell 15 less Pegasos II boards and the Blade servers plus any contracts for maintaining Guardian, blades, settops + software development, will obviously attract the "premium" prices that competitive products attain (although the best feature of the Guardian is that it's $3000 less than the nearest competitor, and saves thousands of dollars per year in electricity bills to boot, so we're not talking "expensive", just "more than $300 a pop").
Once there is a wealth of products out there in the market, Genesi can do a lot better and get away with selling a paultry number of Pegasos II boards (more like thousands than tens of thousands), the same way Apple do.
Note that a Blade server has a hundred uses, and hundreds of possible configurations inside those usage profiles..
The Eclipsis board could in theory be sold as a mini-ITX-competing board (the dimensions have been reported in a German interview by Gerald Carda to be between miniITX and nanoITX), and also become the basis for laptop or tablet systems (A4, 16:9 DVD player was mentioned) or even quite-large-handhelds or other devices (see Microsoft's new "Media Center" devices) or even the ubiquitous example of putting it in a fridge door.
It could also quite easily be a settop in the right case - although I would expect a settop to be much simpler in design, since settops need to be produced cheaply and subsidised by services, and picking a design is more down to "what can we afford to give away and have some scum buy a pirate card and never pay us subscriptions" than anything else. Here is an application for MorphOS too: you don't think that your settops at home have MMUs, do you? Most of them run a quaint Japanese microkernel OS, or ucLinux (which doesn't require or even optionally use an MMU). So memory protection and all that crap are irrelevant. Instead of providing a horrible Unixy base and some custom GUI solution, don't you think MorphOS, MUI and a few clever picture-in-picture tricks could do something just as good and be able to run MorphOS-enabled games, too, from a smartcard?
(Met@box seemed to think so, they had an AmigaOS-clone for the ill-fated MBX1000 - a project that went downhill because of stockmarket fraud more than bad design)
The G5 desktop board would just be a Pegasos II with a new northbridge and processor board, and possibly a new southbridge. The basic fundamental design of PC motherboards is what makes companies like Abit, Asus, AOpen, Chaintech, Gigabyte, MSI, and so on, able to whack out a new motherboard every 6 weeks based on wholly new chipset designs and functionality. The same applies to the Pegasos designs, although a warren of Taiwanese CAM guys are obviously a little faster than 2 highly trained Germans, let's just say they're a little more "sloppy" in the Far East, too.
> continuing relationships in the background and passive support (such as hosting
> amiga.org) should be good investments for minimal effort.
That depends on the people who run Amiga.org. The reason it's not hosted on Amiga servers anymore is because Amiga threatened to withdraw service for posting non-Amiga related news items or something to that effect.
Bill Hoggett wrote:
> If there is a problem, it is only likely to have two causes: (1) Genesi have pulled
> their sponsorship at such short notice that it is impossible to find a replacement in > good time (It may also be forced to move servers if Genesi want to continue to fund
> MorphZone, or be left without a server at all if Genesi pull MorphZone support too)
The reason it's currently hosted on Genesi servers is because Wayne got a job there. If he's really not employed there anymore, I don't see it to be unreasonable that Genesi would start charging for the webspace the same way other hosters do. I don't think Genesi contributed anything except implied free hosting.
Along with acquiring new offices in Las Vegas with which to centralise the operations, hosting Amiga.org in office space may have some new terms and conditions (like bandwidth usage) that were fairly inconsequential in some server farm in Texas.
If that's the case, and no alternative hosting can be found, then.. and.. so? Amiga.org has been freeloading for years, now that time could have come to an end.. but the PayPal button still works. As I said.. if that's the case, donate if you like it.
I'm just speculating though, I must say I don't have a fucking clue what's going on with it. For all I know, Wayne just got grumpy and made an off-hand comment that he couldn't be bothered anymore. It wouldn't be the first time.
Secondly:
MorphZone is not hosted or "funded" by Genesi. The guy who runs it just happens to be an employee. This is practically coincidence. The server is owned and maintained by that guy's friend (Gary Sarff) and by odd coincidence is at the same server farm as the Genesi servers.. not a coincidence, as it was the MorphZone guys who recommended it.
It's been *intentionally* NOT associated with Genesi in any financial way, including the advertising policy - send a product to a MorphZone *user*, get them to review it, and get free advertising for a year.. Genesi already did this hundreds of times over (free Pegasos boards!), Felix Schwartz et al. got a free ride on the basis of the SuperBundle (every Pegasos owner gets a free copy of FXPaint and so on anyway.. free boards, free software!). The rest of the world need to start shipping review products to ordinary people. I personally think this is a great solution, given the lack of print magazines these days.
=Prime=
http://www.flyingmice.com/cgi-bin/.../95775.shtml
Paitsi että Amiga Inc. ei tietääkseni uhannut Waynea missään vaiheessa lopettaa ilmaista serveritilaa, vain jos hän myisi Amiga.orgin. (Painetta tuli kai lähinnä MikeB:n kaltaisilta ulkopuolisilta.)
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