It's taken me a lot longer than I first expected to try and answer this. I know at the time that I believed a gap was left in the Home Computing market without the Amiga's /ST's etc and the PC was a clunky replacement at best. I wanted something that was fun to use that appealed to game players/coders/ content creators and so did a lot of others.

Looking back problems were many:

1. Funding - the balance between running a computer business/part-time lecturing and funding a start-up was too much to achieve. Investment was next to impossible to find and what was particularly frustrating was the lack of believe many of the funding gatekeepers had (you'll never compete against Microsoft etc)

2. The Phoenix Consortium - Nice idea but too many hobbyists and not enough really committed developers - Next to impossible to tell the difference. Credibility was a problem - at the time QNX was supposed to be on board yet QNX UK had heard nothing about the consortium which didn’t help credibility

3. Focus - too much time spent discussing and negotiating with the community rather than just getting the prototype complete

4. Developers - Applications, Games etc - not enough done to work with Developers on what they wanted and needed

I'm sure there were lots of other problems and I'd be interested in comments from anyone who was around the Amiga Market at the time (or part of the phoenix consortium)

Barnie