I'm less interested in Barry's life story than in learning what his goal is and what drives his decisions. I don't want to make assumptions about the guy when we could hear it straight from him, but the website full of unmaintained announcements, irrelevant minor details in the absence of solid, significant information, and arguably misleading comparisons to the actual original machines, not to mention the behavior of his employee-slash-unofficial evangelist BigBenAussie (who has been openly hostile not just to flamers, but to people with actual, honestly-stated concerns about the site and the products) raise some serious questions about what he's even trying to do with this.
It's so funny. The exact same thing could be said word-for-word about Ben Hermans and Hyperion/A-eon.
Personally I think Barry is a bit of a huckster. Unless CUSA comes up with something crazily compelling I don't see myself ever buying a CUSA product. But I have to give the guy credit, he's done a lot better job of promoting CUSA than Hyperion and Co. have done. And yet they're both doing essentially the same thing - Hyperion has an Amiga labeled OS, and CUSA has a Commodore (and soon Amiga) labeled computer. But CUSA has been at it less than year as opposed to Hyperion's ten years.
The thing is, the concept behind CUSA is so simple - how can anyone wonder about what the goal is or what drives Barry's decisions? The goal is: take the easiest route to getting some Commodore machines out there. It doesn't matter if it's little more than a familiar looking case and a label, the name Commodore still has resonance. And after that do the same with Amiga. Clearly the objective is to make money, and as for what drives the decisions it's just the easiest route.
It's a damn no-brainer. It really makes me wonder why Hyperion went through (and still is going through) the effort of making yet another Amiga-like OS and some weird-ass proprietary hardware when all they had to do was slap a label on a box. To me the question should be what is the goal of Hyperion and what drives Ben Hermans decisions, because what Hyperion does has no traction.
I've heard that the CUSA TV ads were shown at the meeting, and will air on all the major networks. Once that happens the name Commodore will really be out there in front of a lot of people, many of them who haven't thought about Commodore or the Amiga in well over a decade. Just musing here but what's going to happen when those people start showing up on sites like this and AWN?
