My evening with Commodore USA, LLC

[persia]

Yeah they show that American gridiron grand finale on SBS (the ethnic channel here) it's on the middle of Monday morning so it basically is watched by a few unemployed migrant indonesians who wonder wether it's a type of Rugby or not.

Ok guys, I'm going to be off to celebrate Super Bowl Sunday here soon. I may or may not be checking this thread throughout the day.

Go Dolphins!!! Oh wait... :cry:

[persia]

Well, the BS resume he publishedd doesn't seem to reflect that.  As far as we can tell, he inherited a furniture store and tried to set up a couple satellite TV installer companies.  That doesn't make him a mover and a shaker in most peoples books.

The other part is management capabilities.  Barry has never had a business failure, he has the basic instinct of what will work and what will fail.  Unlike a lot of business owners who trying to make it, Barry has already made it and could be retired for the rest of his life.  This is his passion, this has capture his interest and he can throw himself into it with out the worry of losing everything.  His pockets run that deep as his connections run extremely deep world wide.   Barry is a different animal then what we have seen since the days of Jack Tramiel.

[persia]

Settlements are subject to interpretation, interoperation is done in a court of law, courts of law make decision on which lawyers can make the best arguments.  Barry has more money for lawyers than does Hyperion.  Best guess is that there's enough wiggle room to say that Workbench 5 and AmigaOS 4 don't compete in the same market or for the same customers.  They aren't even in the same league, an order of 250 X1000s is a standard order, I'm willing to bet that a standard order of Amiga 1000x is 100 times that.

As to your second point, there are maybe 5000 people to whom Amiga means something.  We're too small to be a voice in too big a world.  I won't buy C=USA products, I wouldn't authorise purchases of C=USA products in the area of my university that I have that authority over, but realistically that means nothing to C=USA, those tiny number of computers won't make or break the company.  Realistically they are insignificant.

OK, I just spent some time reading the 43-page settlement between AI and Hyperion. It's clear to me that AI cannot market or allow a licensee to market an operating system with software architecture that is substantially similar to AmigaOS. That's why no C=USA "Amiga" running AROS. (Though certainly an end user can install AROS if it will run on the hardware.)

The settlement agreement also stipulates that neither AI nor any licensee can market a product that is billed as "an Amiga operating system."

So who here wants an "Amiga" that doesn't run an Amiga or Amiga-like operating system? And why, for goodness sake?

Does calling it an Amiga and using the name "Workbench 5" on a Linux distro that has been redressed to resemble the Amiga operating system violate the settlement agreement? I really don't know for sure, though it sure smacks of violating the spirit. My layman's opinion (that's all it is, I will admit) on the matter is that the area is a gray one.

But if Commodore itself (the one run into the ground by Mehdi Ali and associates) had survived to sell Amiga-branded computers running Windows or Linux and not "an Amiga operating system" I would howl and "harp" and keep on doing it.

"Amiga" means something.

And the Amiga operating system *IS* a continuation.

I gotta go to work. See y'all later.

[persia]

I find it funny that Barryites are making him the next Steve Jobs and those who don't like him see him as a furniture store simpleton.  There is a middle ground here folks.

[persia]

@EDanaII

New coke doesn't apply, classic coke was a living product, Classic Amiga is not.

[persia]

Yep, C=USA/Amiga Inc might say that they won, being able to dump the boat anchor AmigaOS...

No they didn't. They settled. And how you can regard the terms in settlement a victory for hyperion is beyond me...

[persia]

Actually the more I read about Barry the more I realise he fits Commodore to a T.  Part success story, part huckster, part sleight of hand artist, it's a match made in heaven.  Commodore always was 2 parts reality to 3 parts belief, Barry will be able to deliver this well.  I'm upping my odds on him, I'd say there's a 50/50 chance that we'll still be talking about him in 5 years time.

[persia]

I looked at the article about Barry again and now I know why we thought his satellite TV company wasn't real.  The article was dated 1984!  I didn't go back that far in my research, those records are hard to find on the internet.

When they mentioned satellite TV I assumed they meant something modern, that was my mistake.  So am I correct in saying that Cabletron was pretty much squeezed out with the advent of the 90 cm dish and paid subscriptions to satellite TV?

That would be interesting that Barry's business suffered from the same problems at the same time as the original Commodore.

[persia]

And you are 100% sure that what he told you is the truth and not just spreading F.U.D. to tap some of AEon's potential customers?
If so, what is your confidence based upon?

I think what he means is that from a commercial point of view X1000 isn't viable.  The fan base is there, but it's only at best a thousand or two and at worst in the hundreds.  There isn't enough profit there to keep a company going in the long run.  He wasn't commenting on the computer but rather on the economics of making the computer.