You know, I was |==| this close to buying an Amiga Mini (that is the net on a tennis court). I really appreciate the form factor, and I realize I'm buying "a Linux box." I thought it was expensive, I had a friend tell me "you can buy a whole lot more for less" and i thought, "no, I'm investing in the future, big, bold, etc."
Eventually this summer, I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad E530 with an Intel Core i7 3612 QM (whatever the heck that means, it is a quad-core). I paid $825, delivered, for it. It is very fast, it sips electricity, runs on a whisper, and if I am so inclined, I can spend $100 or so and get it up to 16GB of RAM when I need it for a work project. In fact, I'm using it now. Lenovo has great customer service, I was able to add a video camera to it, and I got a tracking service when I completed my purchase.
Commodore: you lost the sale because I realized I was in dream mode again, and that's how I usually make a financial mistake. You are competing with Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and the lot, and I realized that's really what I wanted: something business grade. You haven't made a new machine worthy of your brand, and I can't believe I spent four hours offering up a product direction strategy in an email from my corporate account that didn't get noticed. You won't beat Dell in the small margin commodity server market, no matter how hard you try, because you can't be bothered to hire even an overseas outfit to handle your tech support. You are marketing but you aren't selling, and that's not closing deals. Why aren't you actively going after a small business office hardware refresh? Gosh, your market is so easy to get some leads. Fish for a contact at I dunno... Sears, and offer to sell them their desktops for a refresh at an irresistible price, and include a premium hardware support plan for two years. Pay someone locally to be "on call" for your customer, and you'd have unbeatable customer service to have a fella making house calls a couple times a month and taking calls.
Also, you wiped your forums to cover your tracks, especially when I (with Xerxes) made a lot of racket about the power configuration being wrong (neither of us take credit for it, someone on Amiga.org pointed it out first, we just went after it). That helped me feel better about not buying your system.
Leo: CTO's don't write scripts. You have an executive position and set the direction of technology, nothing else. What you are is a principal architect and QA lead and tech support. Barry isn't coaching you very well (by example) on how to be an executive. I'm sorry about that.
Amiga / C= community: Linux Mint is a great distro. I'm sure it will be fine for you. Zotac makes great hardware. As long as you didn't get the Core i7 machine, you should be fine, but they didn't test the configuration all that much at Commodore USA. Nobody feels the "soul" is in these new Linux boxes. Barry is feeling nostalgic, and that will wane. I think he's at the age where retirement is a consideration. Your best bet is to hope everything gets sold again, but I do not see the Commodore USA business model turning into a source of revenue to support $5M / yr in Research and Development and this certainly wasn't started with that kind of funding. If the remaining 10,000 Amiga fans were able to scrape together $10 Million (USD), or even $6 Million and a lot of "share equity" for part-time engineering work, then the Amiga could rise from the ashes.
Tesla Motors got 11,000 people to put $5,000 deposits down on a car they hadn't seen, touched, much less driven before, made with radical new technology. That's way over $50 million. I have since test-driven one of their cars and had a tour of their endless factory in Fremont. Be honest with yourselves: if Commodore USA isn't making something as amazing as a Tesla car, they are a flash in the pan and nothing more. I keep wishing Commodore USA wasn't a shanty of an idea, but dreams that I don't pursue/build are not ones I can influence.
