CommodoreUSA CEO Interview Answers

[persia]

Yeah, in the end the Barron isn't the Anti-Christ, just another businessman trying to make a buck, he saw the Commodore and Amiga brands as a chance for that and he took it.  In the end who wouldn't?  He's not going to produce anything for the retro enthusiasts, there's no money in that, as is more than evident from the businesses that have tried.

He's just a guy who used to make cable ends and is spending his own money to try to build a business that will outlast him.  It comes with middle age, suddenly you know you aren't here much longer and you want to leave something that says "I was here."  I really do empathize with that, but in the end his products aren't for me.  I can see if I owned a computer shop, I would sign up for his programme, because it would make my computer shop different to the other computer shops around, but I sold my business years ago.

In the end I appreciate that he took the time to explain everything, and just because I'm not a potential customer it doesn't mean I don't wish him well.  After all these years, there is no second coming of the Amiga.  I will love my classic Amiga toys and emulators and continue with Apple products for my modern needs.

[persia]

@Nameless

OS4 and MOS are both the equivalent of MacOS 9.  They are as far as you can go with the original operating system.  The point where there is no patching able to make the operating system modern, the cost of rewriting AmigaOS to run on top of a Linux kernel, like Apple did with a BSD kernel, is too high and the payback is too small.  A decade or two in stagnation is too much to recover from.

C=USA is not in the retro business, except as it sells machines.  Yes the handful of us who still love and appreciate AmigaOS or the original C64 may not buy their products, but somebody who had a C64 as a child and hasn't seen or used one in many years might.  I've been thinking about getting the C64x, loading Windows 8 on it and using it as a conversation piece.  A bit of kitsch...  A souvenir of the early computer days that has some use.

[persia]

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.

[persia]

nope it's fine

It's just slow, it probably runs on an Amiga Mini...

[persia]

@Leo

Man you are saying the exact opposite of what your boss has just said!

Do you two even talk to each other?

+1

Are they playing good cop bad cop?  Barry made it clear he has no interest in NG or Classic Amiga.  It's just a name.  I've moved on, I no longer expect Amiga to return in any real sense.  Can't we just leave it at that, you guys do what you want to try to survive and stop coming to sites devoted to the classic Amiga?  Let's just put some space between us, you have nothing for us, we have nothing for you.

[persia]

At some point they will hit the end of the faux retro market, but nobody know how deep that market is.  It's most certainly larger than the classic Amiga market, but all anyone can do is throw out numbers, a hundred thousand?  Half a million?  A million?  If it's on the million side they might go for years before hitting the wall.

The Commodore name is a dual edge sword.  For every one person that remembers it fondly there's at least another one or two that remember it as cheap plastic crap.

[persia]

@Dammy  I was speaking of the Commodore name, not anything that this new Commodore makes.  There are a fair number of people that remember the Commodore name as a producer of cheap plastic crap, whether you like it or not, because, in the end they did produce cheap plastic crap. The original Commodore had about an equal number of lovers and haters.  No company has ever achieved universal love.  Commodore marketed on price.  Low Price.

[persia]

@Dammy,

At least we are in agreement as to WHO the Amiga Community is....

Then the community needs to get a petition together asking C=USA to lower the required number of units.  Five hundred is not that significant number of units, it speaks volumes on the real world potential market strength of the online Amiga community.

[persia]

The real test for CUSA is when the Faux Retro market becomes saturated.  That has yet to come.  Commodore was never a quality brand and it'll be hard to sell someone a more expensive Commodore when they could just buy a Dell, HP or some shops brand.

[persia]

@koaftder

C=USA's goals are low enough that they can make them, at least for now.  But they don't do anything that a typical mom and pop computer store does, assemble off the shelf hardware.  I've done it, a lot of people have done it.  But what that means is that they essentially made the goals of producing an Amiga by abandoning everything it means to be an Amiga.  

While most of us realise it is impossible to pick up where Commodore left off, there should be something unique about Amiga, some reason other than the name to be loyal to.

[persia]

Think of CommodoreUSA as a large computer shop, but with fewer products.

[persia]

@Middleman

The Amiga brand was sold to Barry the Cable Guy, he's producing a generic line of PCs that bear the Amiga name, why in Zeus' name should I even consider that an Amiga?  Let's say Harley Davidson went out of business and Honda bought the name and brought out a line of mopeds with the Harley Davidson name, would you thing they'd attract old Harley owners?