It seems to me that our concerns and evaluations of AMIX have often focused on issues that appear peripheral. The implementation of AMIX has encountered its share of the unforeseen technical delays that befall any engineering project. The delays which have ensued, and the way in which the problems have been addressed, are on the order of our experience in such projects as AutoCAD 2.6, Abbey Road, and AutoCAD/Macintosh. Let's not confuse the inevitable technical difficulties in realising a complex project with our belief or lack of belief in the value of the goal we're working toward. In all of the AutoCAD projects I named, at no point would we have considered a schedule slippage as grounds for cancelling the project as long as we believed in the product we were developing. So it should be with AMIX. If we understand and believe in the goal, then manageable schedule slippages should be accommodated. If we believe the goal to be unachievable or illusory, then we should expend no further effort or money in its pursuit, regardless of the state of its realisation.
I do not intend by any of this to demean the demonstrated competence and manifest dedication of Chip Morningstar, Randy Farmer, and the other members of the AMIX development team. They have undertaken a difficult task and are well on the way to completing it. I think, though, they would be the first to agree that while failure to complete the software development tasks they're doing can spell doom for AMIX, success can only grant AMIX a chance to succeed. I am confident that the AMIX development team will complete a product within an acceptable time and budget, albeit having encountered slippages on the order of those experienced by our other development projects, adequate to grant the AMIX business concept a fair trial in the marketplace. Consequently I'm not particularly concerned with the details of AMIX software development.
Editor: John Walker