While I would
love to go and post this thread about a computer with nothing at all in common with the Amiga in "Amiga News & Community Announcements," as is traditional, I'm afraid I suffer from a compulsion to put threads in the appropriate forums, even at the expense of wantonly flaunting them for attention
Now, we all know the obvious and sensible approach to re-launching a classic computer line: first you license a brand name from whoever vultured it from the corpse of the original owner, then sit on it for a few years while you try to decide how best to exploit it, and your CTO has little squabbly feuds with people.
Then you start ballyhooing for a year or so about getting replica cases made and what a miracle of engineering and business
that is, while your CEO has big squabbly feuds with people, and you have your hangers-on dance around ever actually admitting that the hardware underneath is going to be a generic PC clone. You also buy ad support from Disney and act like this is proof you've been chosen to be the next Pope.
Then you stick a mediocre PC clone board inside, forget to cool it properly, and yammer about how many hundreds of thousands you're going to sell, and how you've totally got contracts with Wal-Mart, for real, and no people can't see them, while you make a big deal out of getting new office space in a strip mall, and your CEO asks people about their sex lives.Then you sort-of-release it for three times the value of the components, and the mainstream media picks up on it for a day, goes "huh, whaddya know," and utterly forgets about it afterwards, and a handful of people pre-order (make sure to never actually release any numbers, so that nobody can know how poorly you're doing!)
Then you dance around acknowledging the cooling issues for a while, and decide that the thing to do is moderately improve the cooling, but put in a newer, mightier board that will run even
hotter, while publically wanking to the idea of selling $25K workstations with $1000 branded cases, even though you think "support" is what you use to keep your junk in place during football practice.
That makes perfect sense, right? It's obviously just good business and helps community relations like you wouldn't believe. So imagine my surprise when I discovered
this. These peoples is crazy!
What do they think they're
doing? They've got some crazy project where they
actually replicate the function of a (cult)
classic computer in hardware, when
everybody knows the way forward is to give in and become PCs! And even though
everybody knows that you can't have custom hardware and not cost a bajillion dollars since that's what limited production runs cost, and custom cases are a miracle from the heavens brought down by the Archangel Barry,
they've got both! And all they're asking is
$400! Shouldn't that be like
ten times that much? It's like they don't understand this business at
all!