CommodoreUSA CEO Interview Answers

[commodorejohn]

Hey, Transition, mind posting this in a format conducive to copy/paste? It'd make further discussion a million times easier.

Anyway, my question was not answered, so I'll just re-post it in case Barry is lurking about: If a single Amiga fan (i.e. Trevor) can, with his own money, fund the design and production of a whole custom PowerPC board and distribute systems based around it, why can't CUSA accomplish more than selling equally expensive computers made out of commodity PC parts?

[commodorejohn]

Nothing the Baron does really affects us.  Don't sweat it, enjoy your Amigas, MOS, AROS, OS4, UAE.  As long as you are having fun what does it matter if he makes a few bucks off the name?  

And understand he has to hype his products.  Nobody in advertising is allowed to tell anything like the truth.  He's selling desktop PCs.  Desktop PCs are the only part of the IT market where sales are stagnant.  If you don't toot your own horn no one else will.  He has a gimmick, a name out of the past.  A name with some goodwill associated with it.  He uses it to generate sales.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but to get into a stagnant market without a gimmick would be financial suicide.

If Barry chose to get into a market he can't possibly compete in, design and price in such a way that he's not even trying to be competitive, botch every aspect of marketing his products, and shell out to Bill McEwen for a brand he has no idea how to use, that's his problem. I'm not obligated to approve of it, or even to nod and shrug and go "well, that's business for you."

[commodorejohn]

90% of what Barry said simply showed me they are so out of touch there's  not much hope regardless of what nameplate they are slapping on stuff,  though I laughed at the mentions of Apple and Alienware in the Q&A  session.
All I read was 30 pages of disdain for the dedicated Amiga fanbase,  so don't give them the satisfaction of giving them any press.  We are  irrelevant to them, for God's sake make them irrelevant to us.  They  have absolutely no intentions on doing anything to benefit any of us -  they are simply plodding along selling stickered PC's as "next gen  Amiga's".  Don't buy them if you don't agree with this ideal, and if  you'd prefer to make your own "Amiga", there's 100 guys on here that can  tell you how to do it for half the cost.  Isn't a single component in  the Amiga Mini that cannot be bought off the shelf.

Support the guys like Jens, and the AmigaKit type vendors - the guys  keeping the legacy/Classic Amiga market alive.  If I had the options of  cool HW when I had my old A4000 that I would now if I'd kept it, I'd be  in paradise.

The FPGA crews.  Mike @ FPGA Arcade, Natami crew, Minimig, etc.  These  are the guys getting their hands dirty, doing the soldering grunt work  trying to bring you an affordable blast from the past.  These guys are  an inspiration in a world when all our legacy gear is getting near 20  years old.

+1 to this. So many people behind so many projects have done more for this community than Barry ever has - who cares if they don't have The Name?

commodore-amiga.org appears to be down.

Guess their servers "couldn't handle the traffic!" :rofl:

[commodorejohn]

It's also pretty funny how this puts the lie to all the "well, we really do intend to do things you guys'd be interested in, if only you'll fund our ventures by buying our overpriced PC clones" talk...

[commodorejohn]

I really have to wonder if people are reading the same interview I was reading.
Commodore USA is currently a small company, with limited resources, and with limits to Amiga IP usage. We are doing the best, with the IP we have available to us, as we possibly can.
It's all fine to sit there and say, oh, I woulda done this I woulda done that.
We have to be rational about our business right now so as to avoid potential money pits. We're in it for the long haul.
We would love to do all the various things the community want, but we quite simply can't at the moment for various reasons both legal and financial.
But be assured that it isn't because we have no interest in doing so.
If we had the kind of money that would allow us to take such risks, and tackle such projects, then of course we would.

Evidently we aren't reading the same interview you are - we're reading the interview linked at the top of the thread, wherein Barry states multiple times over that CUSA won't be supporting NG Amiga-like OSes, won't be supporting further development of Amiga emulation for Linux or any kind of integration into the OS, won't be supporting projects like NatAmi or PPC boards, and says, and I quote:

AMIGA can mean many things to many people, and not many can agree on what it is, but as long as you are convinced that AMIGA is a certain narrow set of hardware and software rather than a concept as we do, there can be no convincing you of the merits of our activities. You have to let go to take off.

He isn't interested in doing anything we're interested in (even where he isn't legally barred from doing so,) and he thinks of the Amiga as some nebulous "concept" that means basically whatever he wants it to mean, and tells anybody who disagrees to shove off. This isn't a case of "just hang with us and it'll get better," as you've kept saying. Even if CUSA had money and connections, which it doesn't, Barry would have absolutely nothing to offer us. This is what I suspected for a long time; now he's confirmed it. What is there left to say?

We had the good fortune to be able to acquire usage of the trademarks, and there's no point sitting on them and doing nothing with them just because it isn't 100% what we wanted from day one. That gets you nowhere and Rome was not built in a day.

No, and Rome wasn't built with a sign saying "Carthage" out front and charging twice as much in tax as its priciest neighbors, either.

We actually WANT to do all the cool things the community want us to do because we also believe it to be quite interesting, and in many ways align with our ultimate strategy.

As others have said, do you even talk to Barry? Because he's said quite explicitly that, as a company, you don't want that.

I quite honestly believe you should pray for our success, not our failure, because we want to be the catalyst that re-unites all facets of the Amiga IP, and ultimately create the kind of high tech computer and environment all Amiga fans would like to use and see further developed.

Pray for your success? Why? Any success in "[reuniting] all facets of the Amiga IP" you'd have, under the restrictions Barry's statements place on such a thing, would boil down to essentially what you're doing now: redefining "Amiga" to mean absolutely nothing, so that it can be applied willy-nilly to whatever overpriced, mediocre PC clones you feel like shipping out. I don't want that to succeed. I want it to fail, hard, because (and here's what Barry doesn't get, no matter how many times we explain it) "Amiga" is an actual thing, with actual properties that endear it to actual people, not just a nebulous "concept" of "so-and-so horsepower and oh, it makes nice pictures and sounds too, and probably does the Internet." I want to see new Amiga projects that embody some of the aspects that made the Amiga great. Yours do nothing of the sort. Therefore, your success in this venture is the last thing I want.

You feel a sting right now, I know, but I believe it will all work out for the best in the end.

"Just keep quiet and don't struggle, and we'll be done with you soon."

[commodorejohn]

Not at all. We each have our own opinions about what's important about the Amiga and how the various projects you mentioned compare, but all of them do have aspects in common with the original Amiga. Not everything, of course, but many things. CUSA's products have nothing whatsoever in common with the Amiga. I'll admit dissent on the question of what's important about the Amiga (hardware? Software? Both?) but I will not accept the notion that you can just slap a sticker on a Linux PC and claim that's the same thing. That's the same as saying there's nothing important about the Amiga, and if that's true, they sure as hell don't need to be exploiting it.

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, maybe I'm the lone guy that found it "odd" that a 30 million dollar ad budget is now suddenly pinned on the ad agency.  Just like how I found it odd the claims of being partners with Disney and everyone else, and now C-USA is being portrayed as "a small company that made some mistakes".

No, lol.  You can't have it both ways, you can't put on the big boy pants and be condescending towards the entire community for YEARS, saying you are gunning for Apple, then flip the switch and be the little guy, trying to eek out an existance while gladhanding false apologies.

You're not alone in the least - I just thought it was so blatantly obvious as to be unworthy of mention. But, you know, just for the sake of clarity: Duce is absolutely right. CUSA's varying claims of being both the Next Big Thing and somehow also a struggling little startup are a crock of shít. They don't have the $30 million advertising budget they claimed (and just like the factory pictures, even if it's true that it was bad information on the part of a third party, which I greatly doubt, CUSA were the ones to pass it on without verifying.) They don't have contracts for hundreds of thousands of sales in major retail chains (and that was all Barry, not some tidbit of misinformation he didn't bother to check.) They're not poised to take down the local PC repair shop in the next strip mall over from theirs, let alone Apple. First they try to claim business savvy and mighty connections in an attempt to impress; now that they've not only failed to impress, but actively alienated the only community who would've been interested in their products to begin with, they try to play the sympathy card and be the Scrappy Little Underdog that just needs a chance! to make good and win the hearts and minds of the community. It's all a front, trying to spin things as whatever they think might be to their advantage and desperately hoping that nobody in the community has a memory longer than three months. Guess what, Barry, we do.

And frankly, even if they weren't spinning this, what would it matter? Even if they're a scrappy underdog company that's "made some mistakes" and just wants to make up for getting off on the wrong foot, they're still a company making comically overpriced, mediocre PC clones and labeling them with the name of a company and a computer with which they have absolutely nothing in common, in an attempt to sell to the people who loved the completely unrelated original. That's inane at best and dishonest at worst; why should we want to give them another chance? Once was enough!

[commodorejohn]

The problem with so many of you is you are demanding CommodoreUSA to fulfill Escom's bull**** and trying to start from 1993 tech. Guess what, motorola has stopped major advancement in the 68k processor. The fastest one is the 68k coldfire and some under the dragonball name from Motorola/Freescale. It is dated and slow. 266 MHz? Um... Well overclock... 300 Mhz.

My bone to pick with the nut jobs on this forum is in nearly 20 years since the last Amiga model was introduced, would you want an Amiga for your day to day regular mainstream computer that compares with your actual paid job or even the kind of job you had got your original Amiga. How many of you got the Amiga 4000 and other power house for movie and other professional graphics work. Would that Natami or other Amiga clones even meet the scrutiny and power and capability that your work place would need today. Would it meet the needs of George Lucas and others. Lets get serious. Amiga was the graphic minicomputer workstation for the masses that can sit on your desk. That kind of professional stature and ability is exactly the kind of stuff Amiga was remembered for. A modern Amiga line must model as a premier of quality graphics with strong grahic facilities. Amiga models with wacoms and various professional graphic software suites for the sectors in professional graphics like DTP, movie & TV CGI, CAD/Arch/engineering, etc.

Actually, some of us remember the Amiga for (get this) being a really neat design in both hardware and software, not for giving Amiga owners a bigger e-penis than PC owners. I don't really care what clock speed is or isn't attained, I'd just like to see a new computer that's a worthy follow-up to what was really an amazingly elegant system for its day.

Barry was very much in place where it really was used and knows first hand what Amiga was about for much of Amiga history beyond the video games which was captured in the Amiga 500 more then anything.

So? The exact same can be said about nearly everybody else in this community. It's not like Barry was present on the mountain with Carl Sassenrath and Dave Haynie for the Transfiguration of Jay Miner. How does this make him any more qualified to do anything Amiga-related than anybody else here?

Your interest is selfish and to your own  personal gain. You don't believe anyone should buy and make money on the  brand or that they are going to be some 1 hour a month bull ****  business that does nothing. You guys don't buy new hardware.

Uh, wait, we "don't buy new hardware?" How is it that the first run of  the X1000 sold out and they're doing a second run, then? Unless you mean  we don't buy new hardware that's assembled from stock PC components  we could get for less than half the cost, perhaps?

Even then, it is hard to classify him and some of these folks  real businesses. They are supporting quasi-businesses.

What's your criteria for a "real business?"

To the point, put your money where your mouth  is. You have no more of rights over intellectual property then 10 to 20  million Commodore owners who had first generation purchasing of  Commodore products.

So? Doesn't mean we're obligated to agree with or approve of the doings of any random schmoe who's shelled out to Bill McEwen.

What I am trying to get at is why you guys waste so many pages of  questions that you already know the answer is that the your suggestions  are totally useless and only serves less than a 1000 individuals  worldwide.

I'll remind you that this whole thing was Barry's idea. He asked for  questions and we gave him questions; if they weren't the questions he  wanted, that's his problem.

[commodorejohn]

Lets go with that but seriously if you want to ask someone who is investing a bit of his or her own money as well as serious business venture capitalists then you better stop with silly notions of ressurecting antiquate technology that not even god and Jay Miner combined could compete with todays tech. Guess what, new inventions came about since then and are fully patented. They aren't sharing their golden goose with anyone unless you talk big bucks like big bucks for even the likes of Bill Gates.

I agree completely. The Amiga can't compete in the cutthroat, pure-commodity modern PC market. (Which is why it's silly to put together a $1300 PC, label it "Amiga," and charge $2500 for it.) But who says it has to? The last time the Amiga was really competing for general personal-computer market share (let alone dominance) was some time around 1990 - since then it's been an entirely separate and self-contained market. The people buying Amiga today are buying it because they like it for what it is, not because they're looking for a modern PC. Suggesting that producing new Amiga-based systems is stupid because they can't compete with modern PCs is like saying Kawasaki should get out of the motorcycle business because their bikes can't carry as much as a Chevy Suburban or go as fast as a Ferrari.

Commodore USA makes more money per year then every single Commodore 8 Bit and Amiga hobbyist-business makes from sales combined. Every one of you except maybe Jim Brain loses money

Got any numbers to back that claim up? (Particularily considering they've only had their main product line available for about a year?)

The next computer "revolution" isn't going to happen for probably 60 years. 30 years to make a viable quantum processor. Another 30 years red taped by National Security Agency of the NWO - the American Global Empire of the world. So, it isn't going to be seen for long after most of you are dead or wrinkled up old men and some women.

...wha...? What does this have to do with anything at all?

I challenge you to come up with a serious plan for product that can be sold to hundreds of thousands of people. I challenge you in this for a product that sustains interst in the Commodore brand, new and even old technology and support.

Why? Hundreds of thousands of people aren't going to buy Amiga, no matter what we do. That time has passed. If we can't take back the market, why settle for mediocre cloning of what the industry is already doing when we could be doing something interesting?

Most of you obviously don't run any real or serious business of any kind. If you had, you guys would not waste someone's who is running an actual business with no viable business plan.

I'm still not clear on how producing PC clones at X1000 prices that no sane person would ever buy and hoping that a brand name rented from Uncle Bill will sell it counts as real/serious/actual business.

Simply put, if you guys just knock off the silly crap then great. If you were employees and I was the CEO and I got this kind of response.... It would be hard pressed for me to not give most of you the pink slip.

Are we employees? Do we get paid for doing things for you or Barry? If not, I see precious little reason to care whether you or he are made unhappy by our disapproval.

[commodorejohn]

What is a criteria for a real business ? A real business is one that provides goods and/or services.

Individual Computers does that. Amigakit does that. Softhut does that. Vesalia does that.

A real business is also one that operates on the basis of making a profit.

Amigakit does that. Softhut does that. Vesalia does that. (I think Individual Computers does that, but Jens can feel free to correct me if he's only breaking even.)

A real business is one that professionally evaluates their investments and the return on investments.

Amigakit does that. Softhut does that. Vesalia does that. (I don't know if  Individual Computers does that.)
 

A real business is one that is about making a living for the owners and where they have employees, provide appropriate wages and salaries to their employees. It is in the same sense as a serious, real job that you take seriously for your living.

Given that CUSA was started on the back of Barry's furniture business and does not disclose the number or salary of its employees, how do you know they meet this criteria?

A real business is not one that is just for donating your time for joy. Programming for free and using pseudo-business names.... Not real. Fake and just for fun vs. Having any serious backbone and structure. Real Businesses doesn't have to be boring but they do have to be for serious intent. They have to be more then just a weekend jerking off time.

Given that CUSA does not disclose the details of its financials and whether the company is self-supporting, how do you know they meet this criteria?

[commodorejohn]

Ok, softhut is a serious business and vesalia and Amigakit. Ok fair enough. However, small retail business still survive but even fewer are hardware developer or producer business. That is what is harder. Hardware producers like CommodoreUSA involve more overhead than retailers but they don't have the extent of R&D investment for designing custom hardware.

They don't produce anything. They put together PCs out of commodity parts and have, on one occasion, gone so far as to purchase injection-molded cases from a factory that does custom molding.

As for any of them..... I don't think any of them discloses their employer or business costs. That is none of our business anyway.

I agree that they're not obligated to tell us, but that doesn't answer the question of how you know that CUSA even meets your own stated criteria.

[commodorejohn]

I probably can look at some numbers that were released and figure the money cost and extrapolate gross revenues from sales prices. However, I can't say it is the totals but I can say they they are closer to CMD in their early to mid 90s days given the larger venue.

Jens, jim brain and most of the hw developer 'businesses' don't add up in gross revenues.

How does Amiga Mini sell.... Well... At the pricing... I can guess it would sell when it has an i7 quad core processor and 16 GB RAM and high end GPUs is about twice the clock rate, twice the number of cores and and faster sysyem bus for DDR3 not DDR2 memory and SATA3 sockets... And you have an OS that has more mainstream software immediately functional right from get go.

Lotta guesswork in there and not much in the way of numbers. I ask again: do you have any basis for saying that CUSA makes more money than the entire Commodore/Amiga hobbyist market?

The OS has a big part to do with whether the product has commercial viability in the mainstream. Linux is strong and viable and in fact Linus Torvald started with Commodore and I suspect he was strongly influenced by C64, Amiga and other system over the years.

The biggest problem with AmigaOS is it lacks mainstream viability because there isn't the apps and the Amiga operating system is largely outdated.

Again, "mainstream viability" is irrelevant. The Amiga is twenty years out of being the mainstream and a good fifteen years past any hope of ever recapturing a significant part of it. Even if you redefine "Amiga" to mean nothing more than any computer that has rented the brand name from Bill, there's no way they can ever make a dent in the mainstream. (Certainly not at those prices.)

Mainstream Computer users don't want to program software.

Okay, if you were advocating for Windows or Mac OS and saying this, that'd be one thing, but if you're using this as a point in Linux's favor? I can only conclude that you've never actually used Linux. Trying to use Linux in any kind of semi-comprehensive desktop PC capacity is closer to programming than some actual programmers get these days.

Ok, semantics.... I was using produce to differentiate from develop. They produce just as much as many of the PC computer brands that don't actually produce the motherboard themselves but get special OEM boards for their product and assemble into their own cases.
 
 Dell doesn't even manufacturer their motherboards. So producing in the sense of a complete product package. Just like a car producer that uses a chassis from on manufactuerer, engine of another and just produce their on body and cosmetics.

Okay, but even by that definition, they've produced a run (10,000, according to Barry) of C64x cases. How many C64xes have they sold? If one were to judge by user posts on the CUSA forums, it's a dozen or two. Have they ordered another run of cases? Have they even made a dent in their existing case stock? How does this compare to the sold-out first run of AmigaOne X1000 machines and registrations for the second run?
 

Lets put it like this, they don't absolutely have to have employees but when they have, they pay them. As far as I know, Leo is an employee and is paid. If he wasn't, I would think he be gone. They have people that work at the communication. As a company with employees, you must pay your employees. I am sure it can be ascertained under public information requests through the proper government entities and get the picture.

And, what, do the people at Amigakit just come in on a Saturday and fill orders for kicks? What basis do you have for suggesting that Amiga hobbyist businesses don't pay their workers?

I do believe they can capture some of the Amiga essence. Now, lets take a look at the underlying framework of Amiga kernal. Isn't it some sort of framework built off of UNIX to some degree but certainly divergent in a massive way.

No. It is not based on Unix. It's not even Unix-like. It's certainly nothing like Linux.
 

Business is simply about selling a product that people would use at a fair price. Jack Tramiel did quite well with that philosophy.

Okay. Now under what logic would you say that charging somewhere around twice the cost of the components for a PC built entirely from commodity hardware is "a fair price?"

So, how in zeus's butthole can you possibly expect a new Amiga PPC amiga that competes competitively with intel.

Who says it has to compete? It's an entirely separate market.
 

How many purchases of Amiga x1000 by hyperion et al. How many was ever sold?

The entire first run (100 machines? I think? Correct me if I'm wrong) has sold and they're registering interest for a second.
 

Lets take a second to think about this, every other Commodore IP holder CEO never even talked to the Commodore members. At least Barry has been remotely communicating with any of you. I give him credit for that.

Wait, so we're supposed to be grateful he comes on here to condescend and smarm and insult us? Dude told me outright that I've never accomplished anything in my life, and he doesn't even know me. I'm supposed to be impressed because he deigned to talk to me?
 
 

Show me 1,000,000 Amigans actively using Amiga. Considering you need to expect a 1% of them might purchase a given year. R&D for a hardware developer is easily $100/hr. For labor of time. You need to have account for at least a year to get someone to bring price cost to something a million might buy but expecting only 1% success rate.

Where are you getting these numbers from?

[commodorejohn]

To be fair, after looking at the answers after his reply, I think the Amiga community in general I think is being too harsh on his company, and being too pessimistic about certain things a little too early. He has said he is a small company slowly working to rebuild the Commodore and Amiga brands. As  Leo has mentioned many times before Rome wasn't built in a day…..

It's been two years. If they haven't stopped with the compulsive lying/spreading of misinformation and general abuse of dissenters now (to say nothing of the obscene markup,) why should we expect them to suddenly get better at any point in the future?

[commodorejohn]

You can either get new people or serve only those that are already die hard people. The only way to get new people is in the mainstream. That is where they are. Old people that once was here and now is there - is there.

I disagree, but even if that's true, it's simply not going to work trying to break back into the mainstream. The only people who still hold enough affection for the Amiga, 20 years after Commodore's bankruptcy, that it would impact their purchasing decisions are the people who liked it for what it was, not for its name. Many of those people are right here in this community; those that aren't, if by some chance they ever hear about CUSA, are going to look into it and go "what the hey is this?" because it's not only not what they remembered, it has absolutely nothing in common with what they remembered - not even a case design! Even if there were any still interested, the sheer absurdity of the pricing would put them off.

They can't retain old die-hards by abandoning everything that the die-hards value, and they can't entice new people with a name that means nothing to the majority and prices that would be off-putting to the entirety. It simply doesn't work that way.

I suspect he is better then the other a--holes who would shut down every Commodore website. Sued everyone of the sites with the logos, and had them all thrown in jail and fined for statutory violation of $25,000 per violation and legal precedence is that each day a violation occured would be a violation up to statutes of repose.

Well lets assume 2 years. That is 365x2 or 730 days of violations. Each day a violation. 730 violations at $25,000 and a year in jail for each violation. Imagine 730 years of imprisonment and $18+ Million dollars in fines each. That would be pretty gnarly. Then throw in the copyright violations.

That would be an grade AAA a--hole.

It is a good thing Barry is not one of those.

Okay, has anyone actually tried to do that? What grounds would they do it on? "He's probably better than a hypothetical complete monster with no regard for fair-use laws and who has the run of the courts such that they can impose utterly impossible penalties that wouldn't last ten seconds in an appeals court, and who probably eats babies" is not exactly a glowing recommendation.

[commodorejohn]

10,000 units at $595 is 5.95 Million in sales. Then you have the Vic and other models. So, if you figure about $6-8 million in revenue. How much sales does jens make a year on all his products.

Where are you getting those figures? According to Barry they produced 10,000 cases, but there's no information indicating they've sold even 1/100th of those. Hypothesizing about how much they might make, if they sold every single case they produced with at least a base configuration PC (i.e. not bare cases,) which we don't know, says nothing whatsoever about what they actually did sell.

He is one of the largest commodore/amiga hardware developers existent. The big -10 would be lucky to be between $750k-$1M. That is if they have a good year and that is usually only the one time batch pre-order that happens maybe once in 5 years with each of the developers.

The sw developers generally make $0.

Again, what basis do you have for any of these figures?

So, how do anyone make a living when you are lucky to sell 30-50 of anything.

Who said anything about making a living?

I seen this with many of the stuff produced in the Commodore and Amiga community.

These are ball park and vary. I seen this with Jens, Jim and others.

You say "ball park," I say "wild guessing with no sources to back it up."