Under the "Read More" link, you can find the latest (afaik) publicly available interview with Fleecy Moss, Amiga Inc. CTO.
Be aware that it's an hand-made translation from the one appeared in the Italian Amiga-only printed magazine Bitplane and, as I don't have the original question&answers, it comes from a double translation process.
C'mon guys, turn on your flamethrower!! ;-)
Bitplane: What about the experiences you had during these first years of Amiga Inc. management, after you had bought it from Gateway?
Fleecy Moss: It has been a period with massives of work and sacrifice for everyone, not only for those who work for Amiga Inc., but even for resellers, developers and the same users. The most difficult thing has been trying to make Amigans proud of their platform understand that we needed big investments if we wanted to move on to the future and practically every investor would have preferred to cut off his legs rather than invest money in a desktop
alternative. This is one of the reasons why AmigaDE was born, a product necessary to "excite" the investors, a product that may have success and that can bring us success (and money to delevop AmigaOS).
Obviously, because of the collapse of dot.com industries after 11th September, the market of investments shrinked even more.
B: Lately your web site has been completely renewed, now the Amiga Inc. products are divided into 4 categories: Amiga Anywhere, Amiga OS, Amiga Corporate and Amiga Support Network. Could you please describe them?
FM: Many people, customers, partners, OEM producers and investors that visited our web site got confused on what relationship there is between AmigaDE and AmigaOS. Many "traditional" Amigans considered AmigaDE as a toy, but many investors see AmigaOS as a suicide instead. Amiga (Inc.) believes either in AmigaDE or in AmigaOS, but to not hurt ourselves, we had no other choice than to explain how in relationship were these two, different products.
So now, as you have underlined before, we have 4 sections.
Amiga Anywhere (and AmigaDE) and Amiga OS both have their separate section, the developers have their one, and investors, journalists and everyone else can completely skip the products and go directly to the general news section on Corporate site. It ain't so revolutionary - most of other companies which offer different products use the same stratagem.
B: What are your plans in the short, medium and long term?
FM: For the long term we obviously hope to see Amiga platform (AmigaOS and its hardware) and AmigaDE reach wide success, create
a strong community and make Amiga Inc. a prosperous company.
Plans for the medium term include the hope to see the Amiga platform (AmigaOne and OS4.0) with a 50-100,000 users base, an "awakening" in the applications development for the Amiga and a greater impact on mass-media. Regarding the DE, we want it to appear on every kind of device, from cellphones and PDA, to Set Top Boxes and desktop (Amiga platform included).
In the short term, we want to launch AmigaOne and AmigaOS 4.0, sell 5-10,000 units and see some new applications running on top of them, together with an "evangelization" campaign on printed magazines for the reborn of the most popular computer in the world. On AmigaDE side, we want to have 2 or 3 partners for the cellular phones, PDA and Set Top Box market that push on AmigaDE so the world may see quality applications for AmigaDE becoming synonym of the new way of living in the digital age.
B: How do you think to advertise your products, considering the very few magazines still dedicated to Amiga?
FM: Most of still interested Amigans read the existing printed magazines, like your excellent mag, or they are still in touch with distibutors or with each other across the Internet.
The fact that we had 50,000 download requests for the latest
AmigaOS pictures shows that there are many people still interested,
at least in AmigaOS.
Giving an eye to the future, though, for either AmigaDE or AmigaOS,
we need to penetrate new markets, to have us known from people who never heard the Amiga brand, people who want quality products that do the job in an efficient way at a reasonable price. In this case,
we must focus our marketing action on channels in which Amiga ain't
traditionally available - such as videogames fairs, exhibitions and
all of those places where people looks for rapid solutions, not
expensive assembly-kits: and Amiga, either as OS or as DE, has to
be the answer.
B: Why not create a section, on your web site, dedicated to every Amiga activity and event? It may come useful to have a list of magazines, newsgroups, mailing-lists and other things that talk about the Amiga.
FM: I think this is a good idea, and we're gonna make it.
B: In what kind of relationship you actually are with Haage&Partner and why AmigaOS 4.0 hasn't been developed by them?
FM: H&P have supported Amiga platform in a great way and we count on them to work together in the future. Now Amiga Inc. thinks that time has come to lead and direct the AmigaOS development, so we had no other decision than to choose an internal development team (for AmigaOS5).
AmigaOS4 is a product thought for migrating on modern hardware,
not for doing the big jump ahead (even if for the AmigaOS4 different
versions are planned so that new software functionalities together
with new hardware functionalities will be available) and, for this
reason, we have chosen a partner experienced in migrating software
from 68k to PPC - Hyperion, of course.
This ain't a slap in the face to H&P, this is only an acknowledgement to the abilities necessary for this specific task.
B: Partnership with Hyperion and Eyetech apart, with which other software/hardware producers you had (or will have) in touch, and of what kind?
FM: Yes, there were some collaborations, but I cannot reveal
their names at the moment until they'll be official parnterships
and our partners aren't ready to make public announce yet.
B: When will it be possible to buy AmigaOne and AmigaOS 4?
FM: This is the question of the century :-)
In the past we have "burnt" ourselves (and we have disappointed
many persons) giving dates and then missing them. Moving an entire platform from one hardware to another is a very tough and complex procedure, with many unexpected troubles you discover only during the conversion.
As a consequence, Amiga Inc. decided to show the world only the development progress (with screenshots and updates), but not to announce a release date until when we won't have in front an AmigaOne system with working AmigaOS 4.
B: Which information could you give us regarding AmigaOS 4 and future versions (other than what already known)?
FM: Big steps ahead are made every week, and many information can be collected either from people involved with the OS, or from the AmigaOne mailing-list.
B: Will it be possible to run the new AmigaOS 4 on the Pegasos?
FM: This depends on owners of the Pegasos. Amiga Inc. has always clearly said that AmigaOS 4.0 can run on every PPC hardware.
We only ask that who produces the hardware (or who adapts it)
signs an OEM license agreement, so that they can have a working
version on their platform and certificate the combination (hardware+
software). Doing so, every user buying the product know that the
product itself has the mark of approval from Amiga Inc.
It's not of our interest to limit AmigaOS to some specific hardware
which ain't the whole.
B: Is there something you'd like to say to our readers?
FM: Firstly I'd like to thank them for their patience and loyalty and I would to excuse me for the mistakes we made and the delays we had moving AmigaOS platform on to the future.
In spite of this, we're really doing big big progress and shortly
the Amiga platform will again take off!
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