yes i too am wondering why this is taking so long? i mean how many developers do u have activly working on this? and it is a jump, for example, from something like windows 95 to 98 or a simple just from 98 to 98SE (please excuse the analogy)

Quote:
But it obviously stopped the development of MorphOS on the Pegasos, the worst thing possible happening! It sounds like the end of MorphOS actually!

Goodbye Future

Whats needed to sell MorphOS ?

Well, the center of everything nowadays is the web.
I've written the same about a year ago but I'll repeat.

Give us a web suite. Webserver, scripting and mysql.
(I know there are limited titles for all this ... but
they all lack important parts ...)

Thats a startpoint to everything. From there you can
build a webserver, a home-multimedia center or a
desktop even a settop-box for mediaservices ...
but that just is my selfish desire

PS: If your timeframe of delivery of 1.5 comes true
you can really consider the amigamarket saturated
because everyone will look for alternatives ...ym2c

If MOS 1.5 need one more year to be released!
Then you will loose more then 90% of the MOS Userbase!

The wait one more year stuff sounds depressingly like the OS4 stuff ... for someone trying to decide into what direction to go its even more depressing...

Zimmy

i think if we let a little time pass (a week or 2) some good news may come up that might help clear some of this all up....until then i think everyone here should take a look at the new poll on the bottom left of morphzone...it might help

1 more year for MOS1.5? this is to say the least depressing news and will make me give up the Pegasos+MOS and concentrate 100% on AROS.

Sigh, Bill, what did you say? :)

~

MorphOS 1.5 will not take a whole year to complete. Although with the obvious feature-creep of most development, it COULD take that long.

Imagine MorphOS going from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP level in that year..

I would personally hope for a release around Christmas, it depends on what features are done and what features are not done. So much of MorphOS (and MUI) is interconnected to make it efficient and fast, that it's hard to release one component without the other.

Please don't leave the platform just because Bill is being vague and ambiguous :) The mere fact that we may have MorphOS available to thousands of other potential users means that as software developers you will have thousands of new customers and testers.

The plan Bill outlined in his first post will not affect Pegasos sales as some people have speculated; more be a supplement to them. MorphOS at some point needs to start making it's own money on it's own terms, and driving to a place that it wants to be at (not where the hardware dictates it.. for instance, a MorphOS test on x86 may provoke an embedded systems company to commission a custom PowerPC board just to run MorphOS natively)

For a company, spending $1000 just to SEE MorphOS is a little expensive. The discovery/feasibility stage of software development is not meant to cost any significant money! What if they didn't like it? That's $1000 they wasted. That does not sit well with the people controlling money at most companies.

$1000 for a company DEDICATED to supporting MorphOS and developing MorphOS solutions is not expensive, but it would only be expected that they had chosen it BEFORE outlaying significant quantities of cash on it.

We are pushing MorphOS out to THOUSANDS more developers, and I don't mean in total, we could be talking per month or even per week! If they like what they see they will be encouraged to buy bPlan hardware for more efficient, native development.

It is sincerely NOT the plan to remake MorphOS as an x86-based system. PowerPC is our friend and ally, we are affiliated with Freescale for crying out loud. They are already in the embarrassing situation of owning Metrowerks which produces a compiler and IDE which doesn't even RUN on their own processors, what do you think they would say if we started hawking our products for running on Intel systems?

As a marketing tool, and as a hardware development testbed (for making hardware that runs MorphOS :) the x86 emulated PowerPC environment, which COULD be expanded commercially WELL beyond running MorphOS, this is an ideal solution for many, many situations.

I'm disappointed that so many people are against it. This is not the "end" of MorphOS. This is not the "end" of Pegasos. This is merely the beginning of the big-time.

Neko

Hmph,

I can imagine that a lot of people want MOS 1.5 as quickly as possible. But on the other hand: what are we talking about? Here we have the most advanced amiga-like OS atm (and this will stay that way for some time), with a dedicated team working on a major update, while the parent-company is very actively looking into the market, finding new niches and trying to grow the potential of MOS.

I don't know, but after having used AmigaOS for 8 years without a supporting parent-company, let alone active OS development (I reckon that my old setup is 50% hacks and patches), having MOS is nothing but great.

As I said, I understand that a lot of people were counting on a release of MOS 1.5 in the near future, and BBRV's post was a bit of a shock/incredible blunder marketing wise. But hey, as Neko said, it might be arriving within 5 months; still a lot less than 8 years.


[ Edited by Stevo on 2004/7/21 23:13 ]

[edit]

/me was going to say something about Neko, fireman's uniform and a big hose quenching the flames...but thought better of it!

Steve

@ neko, bbrv and other genesi ppl:

This is a *constructive* thing, therefore listen *carefully*:

If you want to provide more ppl the chance to get a detailed look to
MOS this is a *very* good decision.
But doing this emulated on a slow ppc engine is not good. Now here's
my alternative approach.

1.
Produce some good videos which show the
capabilities of MOS and provide them on genesi.lu

2.
Offer to rent fully configured Pegasi for - say - 4 or 6 Weeks for -
say 100 EUR. I guarantee you 100 EUR is *nothing*, but ppl will get
the real box and have a much more deeper motivation to play around
with it than if they will have by downloading some emulator and some
OS for that emu. They just get the box delivered and have some time to
get familiar with it. 6 weeks or maybe only 4 weeks are sufficient to
learn enough about MOS! Those maschines need not to be freshly
assembled, but can be rentetd to several customers (thus raising the
income per maschine, I guess one maschine can easily do 10 rentals).

3.
If one likes the Peg after renting it offer the chance to upgrade to a
own Pegasos i.e. give a discount of the rental fee for the purchse.

4.
Give a better overall presentation on genesi.lu.


1 & 2 is really important and it is my deepest believe that a real
box is worlds more impressive than the emulated one. Just do it. It
needs some investment (some whole Peg boxes) but I guarantee this is a
good investment.

If you want to please developers then do it right, but not by giving
them only an emulator... One interested in ppc wants to play with ppc
not with an emu - it's that easy, Even embeded developers have this
childlike pleasure which they feel when unpacking an "exotic" computer
but not when fireing up an emulator...



[ Edited by Zylesea on 2004/7/22 0:12 ]

Magnetic,
it's an interesting point and you either end up with something a la UAE...i.e. an idle curiousity that some people might boot into a couple of times, realize they don't know their way around and never boot again or...

It becomes a viable dev/testing platform for people unwilling to take the hardware leap. This second concept is certainly more interesting but places you in the following dilemna:

1. What to do about dev support? All of a sudden you have a bunch more people whining (sorry, reporting bugs...)
2. What to do about OS support? After all, these new developers won't have a clue about MorphOS and probably don't even care/know about the Amiga history....well, with a few exceptions.

Wouldn't this necessarily lead to adding more resources in development and support? (Not that this is a bad thing if the price of a Pear shaped MorphOS can sustain the overhead.....everyone wins if core development speeds up)

Unless you target specific apps or a known/tested quantity with PearPC, I think demonstrations are best left on the native hardware, where features and speed can be guaranteed

Keep the discussion going,

Steve

I want to add some points to this because he is almost onto something but maybe hasn't fully thought it through:

As a service company we have implemented lease based programs, education type equipment pool and 'loaner' programs. They are relatively costly initially - since they require cash to be sunk in initial hardware purchases.

On an ongoing basis, returns require repair (20% to 30%) and there is attrition/scrap (5% to 10%)...

These fixed and variable costs could be covered by appropriate lease terms, although if someone would pay $100 a month, I don't know.

It's the support cost that bite...transportation, phone/email support etc. If someone is paying money, they tend to expect service.

Another thought...another direction.

Steve

@ BBRV

So what your telling me is that Genesi is slowly turning to AInc's style of marketing and hopefully trust of it's user base?

the "When it's done" is old and tiersome.

Come on Bill get a grip before you loose what you started.

@Zylesea:

Quote:

I doubt 100 EUR for 4-6 weeks would even start to cover the costs of renting machines to companies for evaluations.

Quote:

10 rentals therefore would take 60 weeks, and give Genesi 1000 EUR per machine, by your reckoning, per year. I think that is basically charity, not business.

Quote:

The site content is being reworked right now, since everything is shifting due to deals with companies and organisations. Obviously we can't do anything until they are all firm.. until then the site stays.

Quote:

Not ONLY an emulator. You really are being quite narrow-minded now. There are lots of advantages to having a "virtual Pegasos". We can license that the same way we can license the Pegasos hardware - and importantly expose functionality in the software environment that is present in the hardware environment to give a "taste" of what it is like. Until the Pegasos is significantly cost-reduced (i.e. produced in vast quantities) and becomes throw-away hardware, this is what we can do to expose MorphOS to more potential customers. The potential to become a COMPREHENSIVE PowerPC development environment, and remove the expensive hardware requirement from the equation for evaluation, for example, or initial development and testing, is quite great.

Quote:

Find me some embedded developers who think that way, and I'll concede. Until then, I'm not convinced; geek pleasure is completely overrided here by trying to reduce the TCO of MorphOS and Pegasos and TTM of their solutions based on them, for our customers both current and potential.

Neko

[ Edited by Neko on 2004/7/22 0:19 ]

@ neko

i doubt that it will not be possible to give a Peg for rent for
100EUR/4 weeks without covering costs. Sure there will not be a big
income out of that, but it is not "charity" - it is an investment.
Think again about this issue.

PearPC is a nice thing but it is just not a real PPC. Well at least
it's your decision, but I wouldn't do it and i hardly doubt that
someone like Laire is doing a squaredance out of joy by these plans...

i just told you what I think about it...

PS: Regarding embedded developers - sure the most important thing for
a developer is to have a good tool for developing. But to really get
fascinated you need the real thing. Well, I see Cypress as kind of
company who are doing a real good support job for developers. they
offer cheap development kits, have a huge resource of ideas and
solutions and - well contrary to my original point - some of their
development kits do not contain the original processor. But this is
only for design reasons. And it is for truely embedded applications,
the cpu core (in the case i am thinking of it is an 8051 core) is
always present.

@ Neko, BBRV

I stated it already, but if your intention is to bring MOS to other hw
than the peg, then chose the Mac. It *is* wide spread, not as a
common PC but still wide spread. And there is a PPC inside...

/Now going to bed

@bbrv

Quote:

Sorry, but if the company already agreed to resell MorphOS, why is it necessary to come up with a list of things to show? I assume the company wouldn't agree unless they were already "sold". In any case, what markets does this company serve? It's hard to know how to answer your question without knowing the company's purpose in reselling MOS, its target market, etc.

@magnetic

Quote:

Just because people don't agree with you doesn't mean they're not thinking. To me, there are some big questions here.

Quote:

I hope you don't mean MorphOS in its current state. I assume the "cool new OS" will have basic features that people assume every OS has, that are currently missing in MorphOS. I understand the desire to expose MorphOS to more markets, but, like somebody said, you only make a first impression once. Don't you think a lot of people, especially the ones likely to try a new OS, will realize how far MOS still has to go to be a viable alternative?

Quote:

About the emulation thing, little conundrum: In order to impress potential buyers/developers, the emulation has to fast. If it's fast enough to be impressive, the potential buyers/developers are likely to think why not just use the emulation for the actual platform and not bother about buying dedicated hardware. In other words, is there some sweet spot that's fast enough to impress people but enough slower than a real Pegasos to motivate people to spring for the hardware? (And this assumes the OS will have the feature set people expect.)

This seems like a real challenge to me. If the emulation is slow, the strongest points of MorphOS will be killed. If it's fast, it'll be like using Amithlon as a demo to convince people to buy an AmigaOne. . . . I'm sure we're all curious how this is going to work.

BTW, did I miss something in this thread: Is this MOS-on-PearPC thing related to the company agreeing to resell MorphOS?

Personally, it seems to me that if a company sees some possibilities for MorphOS as a product, then the cost of a Pegasos board is trivial. Is a company with the potential to be a significant income source for Genesi going to say "we think the OS looks great on paper and in the videos but we don't want to spend $500-$1000 to find out for sure"? I can't see that. I think it'd be better to get MOS up to speed in terms of features, app support, etc. and in the meantime continue to try selling the Pegasos as a Linux platform, *and* try to sell more boards to individuals who already want them but can't get them. (*And* get a few Phreeboards to the demo guys, whose creations help sell the platform. ) I don't see the point of pushing MOS at x86 developers/users at this point who already have OSs available that are more feature complete, have stong app bases, etc.

-- gary_c

This thread has roots in absurdity, I don`t quite know where to begin, I know reading it annoyed me incredibly, whereas I shouldn't give a stuff considering that I have no intentions in this direction, however its the same pathetic showing that will consign both AmigaOS and MorphOS to complete failure. So maybe because you said something this tactically obtuse in public you got my venom on the matter first, if you'd have held off till after AmiWest Id probably be writing this on AW.net about KMOS, well, hey, it didn't happen that way so here goes.

Firstly, the people on this thread saying that providing MorphOS on PearPC would not bring any further sales or useful penetration are absolutely correct. Gary said it well before. You would need to say "hey, its this slow on an emulator, but look at this video to see how fast it goes" and then demonstrate one or more tangible advantages. This would be if you were sending it to the end user. Anyone with half a brain on a system capable of running PearPC at a speed where they dont want to switch it off after 10 seconds would say "so? how is this better than my Athlon 3200?".

Secondly, business, Neko, I am amazed, you think 1000EUR is a lot of money for a business to try out a complete system with developer support? What businesses are we talking about? Home businesses? Please get real. In companies that can make a significant or useful difference to the Genesi bottom line 1000EUR is peanuts to spend on a system, especially compared to salary costs of the senior developer doing the evaluation. Even a middle or low ranking manager can sign off those kinds of paltry amounts. So that does not wash either.

MorphOS in business? Don't make me laugh, there are only two potential avenues for the current MorphOS on Pegasos to run in a business environment ( surprise me ) and both of which should have an example installation that can be demonstrated ( rather than just taking around a peg-in-a-box and clicking through applications ) - focus Neko! Show potential customers ( businesses ) a generic solution for their market, don't just show silly eye candy that only impresses "fat computer geeks". If you go after say the accounting market ( not saying you stand a chance ) then show a secure, client server accounting application that is as easy to use as Sage but scales! But whats this? The customer is only interested in Linux? Sure, why not, thats the system that currently has credibility in the REAL business world.

You won't get more sales for MorphOS this way, you will be lucky to sell that to more than just end users, and a reseller contract, well whoopee do, that wont bring any revenue in until the reseller actually finds consumers for the boards. No magic bullet here.

Or are we seeing a slight of hand, is it in fact the Pegasos that has got a potential reseller contract ( doubtful its for MorphOS ) and you are bundling MorphOS for free with the boards and thats why you make the claim on page 1 Bill? Did the reseller actually say "hey yes, we want to risk X000 dollars on buying a few peg boards to sell MorphOS, an operating system with an unknown target market"?

At the moment, you are in trouble it seems, you are using technology that cannot be upgraded without significant cost which you need investment to achieve ( you hoped it would be Freescale but that seems to have gone a bit quiet reading between the lines of Neko's recent posts here and on ANN and other places ) a new board design that is vaguely attractive to a mass market ( not saying that Mai/Eyetech are in any other situation by the way ). So you are using a board that is stuck in 2001-land and cannot get enough sales to get it to 2004-land let alone 2005 land and you are fiddling around with ideas about emulators and dealing with businesses that cannot afford 1000EUR??????

Instead of trying to work around Pegasos R+D costs and production problems with PearPC, go Mac for gods sake, or get it working on low end IBM PPC systems - anything but this in-the-box small-fry thinking and strategies.

Carry on like this, and Pegasos/MorphOS will be dead within six months with any goodwill from your own userbase gone.

Take a two pronged approach of nurturing your MorphOS developer and userbase whilst at the same time trying to land a big contract is your only hope. Plus you need to keep the morale of the MorphOS peeps up and not make any more OpenBSD style calamities in order to restore then build up the credibility of your platform BEFORE you kill it by putting it on PearPC and giving it away free with green shield stamps. The ultimate death sentence for both your hardware and your software ( your exclusive appearance of MorphOS on Pegasos is the main reason for buying Peg right? ). If people outside the golden inner circle could get MorphOS for A1200+ppc peg sales would have been non existance. So whats this? A monopoly situation ( like the AmigaONE one on AmigaOS4 ) guaranteeing a few sales? Shock horror.

Stop thinking so damned small. Its the reason the Amiga-related market is so small.

Dave.

PS: Bill, I think you need to hire a decent strategist, what you have at the moment does not seem to really be working don't you think?


[ Edited by DaveP on 2004/7/22 8:52 ]

Quote:

1>... exposure was the reason for Evel Knievel's attempt to rocket-cycle over the Snake River canyon {how did that turn out?}

Quote:

2>...my vote would be to implement this not as "MorphOS under emulation" , but label it more like an I.D.E. for MorphOS that happens to run on x86?? {or some such hybrid of that line of logic}


I think they may be walking a highwire over some thin ice, but whatever works I guess

Dear bbrv,

you want feedback? So you'll get feedback and my feedback is:

Shipping an operating system today without an internet stack is today a strict nono! (except for few embedded purposes).

History showed that concentrating on just the OS doesn't work out: BeOS have had a great OS on a great hardware. They dropped the hardware and concentrated on x86 market. Now they're out of business. NeXt Computers have had nice hardware and a nice OS as well. Dropped hardware, concentrated on x86, went out of business. Just as a different example: SGI have had nice hardware, introduced x86 based VisualWorkstation, got big problems as well and nearly went bankrupt.

MorphOS is nice and fast, but it lacks application support. The most important missing application is the missing (native) TCP/IP stack in MOS, as already mentioned above.
Therefore Linux is the primary choice for an OS on the PegasosII for people like me that want to get rid off x86 hardware but doesn't like Apples.

So, when you want to make MOS & PegasosII a success, then concentrate on satisfying your existing userbase. Satisfied customers and users are the best method to attract more users and customers.

When I received my peg2 in April, I was quite satisfied and happy with the board itself as well as MOS, although I primarily used Linux, because it impressed my by its speed and ease of use. I shared my impressions to other people who got interested in buying a peg2 as well - until the mess began: Linux gave me frequent kernel panics, memtest showed random memory failures.
I contacted the dealer (Vesalia), sent back my 512M memory module, bought a new one, which gave memory errors as well, exchanged that again and still got memory errors with the third module, while Vesalia itself reported to me that the sent back module was free of errors.
My satisfaction went down near to zero with a crashing peg2, sometimes with half an hour. Contacted Vesalia and bplan again, sent board & memory modules to bplan for a rework. Thomas Knaebel ensured to me that I'll get my (working) board back within two weeks. Well, needless to say that it lasted 4 weeks after several phone calls ("blahblah... a new firmware update with new ram settings is coming this week, we're going to sent your board back this week...") without having a fixed board.
Linux still segfaults each day on the peg2. There's still no new firmware update available although it was said to me by bplan that it will come "next week".

I believe this is no good way to win satisfied customers. In fact I'm considering to give my peg2 board back and either buy a cheap x86 (*sigh*) again or a used G4 PowerMac when I got my money back from Vesalia.

Do you really believe I'm still trying to convince other people to buy a PegasosII?
And now you're telling me "Hey, there's a BIG (nameless) reseller! And MorphOS 1.5 will not be released before next year! Isn't that great news?!"
Sorry, but this reminds me of the after bankruptcy Commodore story: "Hey! There's a BIG investor! A new Amiga will be released next year! Just two more weeks for more infos/AmigaOS/Amiga/whatever!!!111"

Is it just me who has bad memories on this kind of "announcements"? As a long time Amiga user I've just seen too many false promises. Please name the reseller to not loose your reputation and release MorphOS with a TCP/IP stack!

And yes, it is really likely that you'll lose me as a customer when it is impossible to get a stable working peg2 with Linux on it...

Now, that's what I have to say as a feedback on your announcement...

best regards,
Ingo Juergensmann

MOS1.5 has 3D Radeon drivers, MOS1.4 doesn't.



... 3D support in one year.. sure... we'll wait

One of the developers of PearPC (Stefan Weyergraf) died this month. Hit by a train, so how will PearPC be upgraded or usable for anything without him?

I've read this thread and a few issues seem to come up again and again:

1. Performance on PearPC
I think the idea of a MOS demo running on a PC is a good idea. Most people seem to agree that running an emulated version of MOS/PPC might be a bit slow, so it seems to make more sense to demo an emulated 68k version. I've heard whisperings that a version of MOS1.4 already exists for 68k. If it ran on UAE instead of PearPC on the PC, then that'd solve the performance problem. The problem of course, is that then MOS would be too usable under emulation - to solve this simply make the demo timeout after, say, 20 minutes. It is just a demo, after all!

2. Target audience
Everyone seems to have differing views on who the demo should target. Let's ignore businesses and "normal" home users - they expect the maturity of Windows and MOS is still comparitively new compared to what they need and expect. The real target market is the computing enthusiast market (geeks), among those who will be ex-Amigans. At the moment they run Linux, Windows or another form of unix on their PCs. This is who we need to show the demos to.

3. People opposed to a PC demo
Where else will new users come from? The geeks are all using their PCs and have no exposure to MOS at the moment. There will be no new big numbers from the Amiga community... I suspect everyone who will choose already has. The only source of new users is from the outside. Unless the MOS community wants to end up like the introverted, inward-looking OS4 community then we have to look outside. A PC demo of MOS is a brave move that could bring many new users. If anyone has a serious problem of a MOS demo runnning on a PC then just think of it as an advert. A time-limited demo is unable to steal users, or damage sales of Pegs... it's just an advert.

4. A Mac version
I think this sounds like too much work for too little gain. Mac users aren't traditionally geeks, and 98% of our geek targets are using PCs.


-smithy


[ Edited by smithy on 2004/7/22 10:09 ]

[ Edited by smithy on 2004/7/23 22:08 ]