Man o man is there a lot of junk thrown around with some half-truths. Here's some information that I hope will answer some questions about JC. I don't think he will be back, not for a long while. Except maybe to own a completed product as he was indeed fascinated by the Amiga.
Jim Collas did for the Amiga what Jeff Schindler tried and failed to accomplish. Jim was able to wrench the entire ideology of Amiga from the grips of the executive board of directors at Gateway. Jim was willing to take on CEO for Amiga but stated the executive board would have to rely completely on his decisions rather than waiting for an approval on the next release of "Schindler's List". Some of the ideas that Jim put into play were from some of the scrapped plans Schindler had come up with.
How feasible is it for JC to come back to Amiga? on a scale from 0 to 10, I'd give it a -8. He left Gateway and Amiga due to the fact that the executive board told him the direction to take instead of relying on his plans; that was the main reason for the sudden switch from QNX to Linux core. There's much more to the QNX switch though, partially thanks to Dan Dodge handing out business cards at a local Amiga meeting bragging about landing the yet to be approved contract. Yet there's more to it still. At the time Gateway was trying desperately to get into the "Digital Convergence" market that Dell seemed to be ruling with their blackberry pagers and other components. Gateway sought after making an extremely easy power on power off internet machine capable of only internet (hence the AOL/Gateway flop that came out in 1999). Gateway was also trying to leverage into the Linux market using an existing subsidary without breaking licensing agreements already written up in the latest Microsoft contract. That's when the Executive board took over, forcing Collas to sway his decisions and moving in an entirely different area he had not planned for. At that point, he handed in his resignation and was to finish out the following month. His resignation included that he was going to put Amiga in a self maintainable state if needed to be. There were about 4 people who knew about the resignation, all of them were in the main seats at Gateway, including Ted Waitte. There's so much more to this than what you'll read from me though, it was shocking to learn all about it after the bean counter from hell was ousted by Ted Waitte.
What did Collas do for the Amiga that wasn't ever seen in the light of day? The famous PDA coined "Project PEA" was to use a similar OS to AmgiaOS2.1. There were two prototypes, one of which I heard about the other I got to see for myself. One prototype was a complete touchpad system, consisting only of a DOS shell that hadn't been updated for any type of graphics. That pad had the basic bluetooth networking. The other system was very similar to what the Palm Pilot is, just no color or anything special outside of an RJ-45 phone jack and keyboard attachment (the one that I saw at least). Project PEA stood for "Portable Email Assistant" and was to replace all the possible palm systems offered by Gateway at the time, but was never finished. My opinion, I think it would have flopped if it were ever to be released, AmigaOS or not. When the concept designs came back from Pentagram Inc, those designs for the Palm type and Pad type were for the PEA systems.
What about Allen Havemose's efforts and his involvement in contracting for Gateway? I honestly can't say, all I know is that he had done quite a bit with his group while out in mid California before it was split up (about the same time "over the moon productions" was deep sixed). I do know there were some interesting developments that Gateway still holds licensing for but nothing was solid enough to patent it. The thirteen patents were given to Gateway/Amiga after the submitted 50+ ideas and if I remember correctly, some of them are still pending.
Why was Bill M sacked? As a contracted employee he walked in to work one day and was told he didn't have a job at the end of that day. Bill was an excellent point of contact for me when I was working at Gateway. When there were people writing in about offering technology to the up and coming Amiga systems, Bill was the first person I contacted. I honestly have no doubt that Bill has roughly the same book of contacts that Jim Collas kept by his side. Bill M is no PR guy, but can move and shake like the best of them squeezing blood from a rock if he had to.
What about Fleecy, he was sacked before JC got there? There's an answer to this, but I don't have it. I started talking closely with Jeff Schindler about the same time Fleecy was let go, he wasn't at liberty to discuss it since the decisions about it came from higher up. Considering Jeff Schindler answered to Ted Waitte and Mike (Ted's starting partner), that leaves me to believe his position was micro managed out. Not much more I can offer on this, sorry, you'll have to get the whole story from fleecy if you want it.
So why the rumor of Jim Collas coming back? That's simple, his 2 years of non compete are up and he can come back if he wants to. The question though, will he. He left a lot of untied ropes to be handled by the next three or four CEOs in charge but noone was ever really in charge after JC left. If JC came back tomorrow, there would be several unanswered questions and an entirely new strategy to overhaul since the last time he handled the reins of the Amiga beast. Anyone stepping into a CEO position of Amiga would have to be fully aware of what is happening now, and what happened prior to the purchase before the majority of the community would listen. The community as we know it was divided when the Linux decision was made, it was around that time MorphOS breathed its first under the Quark micro kernal not to mention the division further with the Phoenix Consortium movement and the power behind the ever evolving AROS.
Put yourself in Jim's shoes, would you want to answer those questions if you came back to handle the CEO position? I know I wouldn't.
Got any more questions, let me know, I'll try to answer them. If anyone has any corrections, please let me know so I can make the addendum to my notes I've been keeping.
:pint:
