CommodoreUSA CEO Interview Answers

[Darrin]

LOL.... I wish because then I have the resources to acquire the IP. Sorry, I am not Barry.

Well your posting style at 3am after a night on the town exactly matches Barry's style at midday after a cup of coffee.  An easy mistake to make.  

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. First generation purchase: I mean, purchased from authorized Commodore distribution and had the official warranties with Commodore or at least qualified. In other words, you didn't get your first Commodore from another another customer.

I have put my money where my mouth is.  Over the last couple of years I've purchased Keyrahs, RTG cards, SDFFs, card readers, Amiga/C64 Forever, a Chameleon64, a C-One, a Minimig and ARM board, an FPGA Aracde and pre-ordered an X1000.

What have you done?

I've bought several PCs too, but I got them from HP.  More powerful than C-USA can do and a fraction of the price.  My C64 Forever and Amiga Forever still run on them though.

As for feeling that you guys think they have any rights over the trademark with all about 10-11 full pages worth of questions that are really unrealistic claims.

Yeah, expecting Barry to just bugger off and sell some PCs is unrealistic.  However, we live in hope.

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. Real companies for international commercial trade of goods requires a market base of at least a million potential customers.

If this was "wasting pages" then we would be posting on CommodoreAmiga.net.  This is the site we have all used for years to discuss the Amiga variations.  C-USA insist on coming here and posting rubbish and as we're here we feel the need to respond.  If they're not interested in what we think then they should stop posting here.  They keep telling us we're not their target customers so why on Earth do they keep coming back?

If you have potential customer base of 1000 individuals then you have to spend no more then $100 in R&D.

Better than that, I don't need to spend a penny on R&D because others (MikeJ, aCube, Hyperion, Indivision, etc) are already doing it and have been for years.  I just by the finished products as I pointed out above.

[Duce]

Gotcha.

You are selling modern PC's branded as Amiga's.  We understand that, we all read Barry's Q & A.  We don't need the business school lecture on financial viability, C-USA has stated they will not be supporting the "purist" market at all.  What's left to discuss?  I thought all the fanboys would be off selling these to people that actually CARE.  In your eyes, you might as well be trying to sell glasses of water to drowning men.  

We get it.  We're the guys stuck in the past, the guys that "just don't understand" in your view.  Why you still here?  How much bad press does one company need?

Once again, we aren't interested.  If we wanted commodity PC's, we'd build our own or buy them from Dell or Best Buy.

I can buy the exact same case as the Amiga Mini for $50 tops any day of the week and assemble it with similar components for far less money if that is the footprint of PC that I want.  Not everyone is capable of that, and I recommend you preach to the proper choir, namely your target market.  We are not your target market.

[Wildstar128]

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.

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?


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?

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


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.

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.

To your specific questions...

What is a criteria for a real business ? A real business is one that provides goods and/or services. A real business is also one that operates on the basis of making a profit. A real business is one that professionally evaluates their investments and the return on investments. 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.

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.

It is subjective and objective. There is objective framework of a business that is for real the. One that is not b.s.ing and nothing. There is some degree of subjective degree.

I think you are twisting the details. In any case, I am not going to waist my time arguing it. It is fair to ask questions but if you are going to be taken seriously use your good judgment in asking questions that isn't stupid.

Barry is a little loose with his mouth sometimes in how he phrases things. If it was me, I would have phrased it with a little more tighter phrasing such as serious, legitimate and sensible questions worthy of responding and worthy of asking and command serious proposals with some serious data to back your proposal if you propose something.

Like business. If I was Barry, I would command that if you want Commodore USA to go about a proposal then bring up a serious proposal with supporting data and be ready for serious critique of the proposal. Where is the money? What is the ROI? Did you plan for media and publications costs for advertising product to get it known. How many are demanding such.

Barry is the "Jack Tramiel" of Commodore USA. Try proposing proposals as if you were proposing to Jack Tramiel. You might get more traction with your proposals, guys.

[Wildstar128]

Gotcha.

You are selling modern PC's branded as Amiga's.  We understand that, we all read Barry's Q & A.  We don't need the business school lecture on financial viability, C-USA has stated they will not be supporting the "purist" market at all.  What's left to discuss?  I thought all the fanboys would be off selling these to people that actually CARE.  In your eyes, you might as well be trying to sell glasses of water to drowning men.  

We get it.  We're the guys stuck in the past, the guys that "just don't understand" in your view.  Why you still here?  How much bad press does one company need?

Once again, we aren't interested.  If we wanted commodity PC's, we'd build our own or buy them from Dell or Best Buy.

I can buy the exact same case as the Amiga Mini for $50 tops any day of the week and assemble it with similar components for far less money if that is the footprint of PC that I want.  Not everyone is capable of that, and I recommend you preach to the proper choir, namely your target market.  We are not your target market.

I'm not selling them. In addition, you might want to know how business operates if you suggest or propose ideas for someone to invest their money.

That would be a good start for you guys. Take some courses in business and run a business.

It might do you some good in your life as well.

[Duce]

No one has proposed anything to Commodore USA.  The "Challenge to the Community" was from them, not us.  Barry answered a Q & A session on his own time.

A comparison to Tramiel isn't an endearing comparison in the least.

EDIT:  If you aren't selling them, what exactly do you want?  To change our minds?

This is Amiga.org.  We use Amiga computers.  You may find that outdated and old, but she's the facts, man.  My SAM 440 sits right beside my 4 ghz, 32 GB dual 590 GTX gaming rig.  I'm building up an A1200.  I'll be buying an FPGA Arcade.  That may shock you in this day and age, but there's a lot of people like me here, frittering around with old hardware.  It *is* Amiga.org, after all.

I'm not sure what your motive is for being here, seems all you have done is insult people and patronized them.  What part of "we aren't your target market" is not understandable?  What part of "maybe you guys should take business courses" makes any sense, when people are here to enjoy CLASSIC and NG Amiga systems - not Linux PC's?

[Pyromania]

@Wildstar128

Do you consider Amiga Inc a serious business?

[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?

[Wildstar128]

Well your posting style at 3am after a night on the town exactly matches Barry's style at midday after a cup of coffee.  An easy mistake to make.  



I have put my money where my mouth is.  Over the last couple of years I've purchased Keyrahs, RTG cards, SDFFs, card readers, Amiga/C64 Forever, a Chameleon64, a C-One, a Minimig and ARM board, an FPGA Aracde and pre-ordered an X1000.

What have you done?

I've bought several PCs too, but I got them from HP.  More powerful than C-USA can do and a fraction of the price.  My C64 Forever and Amiga Forever still run on them though.



Yeah, expecting Barry to just bugger off and sell some PCs is unrealistic.  However, we live in hope.



If this was "wasting pages" then we would be posting on CommodoreAmiga.net.  This is the site we have all used for years to discuss the Amiga variations.  C-USA insist on coming here and posting rubbish and as we're here we feel the need to respond.  If they're not interested in what we think then they should stop posting here.  They keep telling us we're not their target customers so why on Earth do they keep coming back?



Better than that, I don't need to spend a penny on R&D because others (MikeJ, aCube, Hyperion, Indivision, etc) are already doing it and have been for years.  I just by the finished products as I pointed out above.

It might not have been in the last couple of years but in the past 20-30 years, I bought commodore 64s (6502 based ones not the 64x), Vic-20s, c-128, plus/4, cmd fd-2000, jiffydos, amiga 500 (2), amiga 1200 (well, got that one for free), Commodore PC-10, C-One, C64DTV and Hummer. I bought several peripherals, light pens, printers, etc.

In addition, I have been involved in the Commodore community for some time now. I am not against you guys using the old hardware but by and large, most of you don't buy in sufficient volume for sustaining businesses. Why do you think CMD left?

Do you think CMD scale or larger hardware developer business can be a sustainable business.

I'll ask you a serious question, would any of you buy new commodore 64 software on the various peripherals like maybe an intelligent drive that runs on ethernet and you use the various ethernet modules to load the software off of.

Basically a simply pico-itx board, some drives and NIC and just hook it into the network and it can be used on classic and new Commodore/Amiga branded computer products.

Would you guys support such hw with a DVD or Blu-Ray Burner, HD and have it as a peripheral that you can have more advance hardware and software on large media that you can use. Would you guys support something like that?

The hw isn't that important per se. Just that is provide mass media inexpensively through your existing software. If we can support something like MMC/SD media for a front-end firmware to communicate to such external devices and load software.... Like a front end DOS commands that would communicate to "network devices".

Would you support such?

This can be C= 8 bit and classic Amiga and in principle any of the PPC. There are other hw issues but I'll leave it at that as concept and the nuts & bolts for later.

[Wildstar128]

@Wildstar128

Do you consider Amiga Inc a serious business?

They spent the money on purchasing the IP. As for serious business, not recently but we have laws and they own the rights. That is another debate. Lets not go into that one... It is a distraction.

[Wildstar128]

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


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.)


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

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?


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?

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. The CMDs and most custom hw developers are more or less out of the scene except a few like Jens but I doubt he really makes profit as he mainly is making his material cost per unit but not his actual time's worth. I don't think he broke even on Chameleon or C-One and several others products from the sales. Then, jens can make the corrections so guys don't take what I said about him as fact.

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.

[runequester]

What did they "develop" other than a case?

[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.

[Wildstar128]

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is no sense reinventing the wheel in OS matters or starting with something with little real software development in the application area in 20 years. There is plenty of developer tools and art paint tools and some vector graphic tools but not much beyond what a few hundred active amiga commuity demands or produces for themselves which is maybe a few dozen sw devs with a few interest areas and that was the software they got.

The biggest problem with AmigaOS is it lacks mainstream viability because there isn't the apps and the Amiga operating system is largely outdated. Mainstream Computer users don't want to program software. There is little interest in sw developing. Linux is reasonably sensible in that it not only has software developers and companies already on the platform, there is also a vast array of commercial grade software for almost everyone. The only lacking area is MMORPG but even then, not an issue as the developers actually use Linux machines but simply target development of their games to Windows and it is easy enough to make it Linux or Mac or they can simply multiboot and then run it. It is already there.

People don't have to wait days, weeks or months or years waiting for some dev to develop at their snail ass pace. There is even JOBS for Linux. That is the point. People aren't going to spend have a second to consider your product if your product doesn't serve their needs out of book or a simple online purchase oft with immediate download. They aren't going to wait years for someone to get something done.

Even if you buy your own PC, you can download COS-V and have a decent linux distro with the C= flavor from get go if you felt like it.

[Wildstar128]

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.


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.

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.

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.

Having employees is not an absolute to my standard. If that was misunderstood, I apologize for not being clear enough.

[Tripitaka]

Trip,

I guess so when it was 3:## AM at USA pacific coast time. Give it a wild guess and figure that I was up since 8:30 AM of the preceeding day.

Fair enough, we all have bad days. I still think CUSA is an irrelevance as far as anything Amiga is concerned. They have the name but none of the spirit.