[Rant] Hostage Negotiation | ANN.lu |
Posted on 27-Jan-2004 02:07 GMT by Greg Ford | 260 comments View flat View list |
There are a group of people, at Amiga Inc, who have decided that their personal reasons
are more important than the interests of the company, employees, investors, the customers,
and even potential customers, and have ceased any and all effort to involve themselves in
anything at all that doesn't directly relate to these personal reasons, even if it means
earning an income against it's current mountain of debts. Amiga is being held hostage, and someone's looking to do something about it.
The only people that were in any position to remedy this situation were a group of investors who had already lost fortunes in Amiga Inc, and were asked for more money. They were concerned over the money already invested, but told that unless they invested more, they'd never see any returns on these investments ever. The investors didn't like this at all, they felt, exactly like
I said, that the small group of people at Amiga Inc, were literally holding Amiga hostage for more money. They did the only thing they could do, they hired Garry Hare to try to restart the
company and salvage something for the investors who had already invested large amounts of capital into the failed company.
The problem was, those few at Amiga quickly realised that this was an attempt to get around Amiga Inc's demands for more investment capital, and completely refused to cooporate with Garry Hare, and
even going so far as to publicly obfuscate to it's customers Garry's position in the failing company. Garry was instrumental in generating dozens of potentially profitable leads in his three month project that he spent representimg Amiga Inc at tradeshows and technology conferences. Many business contacts and developers became interested and attempted to follow up on these leads, only to be shunned by Amiga Inc who was making it very clear to the investors that they will not be subverted in this way. Either they would invest more capital like Amiga Inc demanded, or Amiga Inc would literally sit on their hands at Amiga Inc and do absolutely nothing, ensuring that the investors money would not produce any potential profits at all, and keeping Amiga Inc in a nonproductive stasis untill such a time when the investors will finally cave in to their demands and give them the investment capital.
To this day Amiga Inc. and the investors are still locked in a standoff, and it appears that neither will give in to the other. The investors are still looking for a way to controll the damage, to get at least a little back from their investment or even wrestle controll as to lead Amiga into promoting it's current technology, while Amiga Inc refuse to both (1) go bankrupt, instead hoping the investors will cave in to Amiga Inc's demands, or (2) try to generate an income, they will not do this as this would be giving in to the investors, who they want more money from.
There is no right or wrong being implied here, but the fact remains nothing will change untill someone gives in. It's quite apparent Amiga Inc believes that it will be the investors who will give in, as they speak quite publically about expecting the next round of funding to be recieved any day now. However I don't know if Amiga Inc realise that, as we speak, the leads that have been generated in spite of Amiga Inc's steadfast resolve to hold out against the investors are being contacted for information about the way in which
Amiga Inc has shunned them when they tried to follow up on these leads. I myself have been contacted although I couldn't offer them anything other than telling them Amiga Inc simply refused to follow up on inqueries I've sent them.
All I could gather from these people is that they are determined to do something about the situation. Unfortunately
I couldn't offer them much. It would be in my own interests as well for this to be resolved one way or the other as
my own plans are in stasis untill something happens as well. Someone has to give. Seeing as how I can't help them much
in any way, I'd like to hear from others who might have information that might help the investors in making their case
that Amiga Inc is intentionally keeping the company in stasis. I'm not sure if they are preparing legal action or whatever,
but to be on the safe side, if you could refrain from posting the details, and instead contact me and I'll give you
instructions on contacting the interested parties.
You can contact me at GregFordEmbedded@hotmail.com, and we can start from there. Thank you for your time.
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Hostage Negotiation : Comment 112 of 260 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Gregg on 27-Jan-2004 18:20 GMT | In reply to Comment 110 (Seehund): > <speculation>
> Could there be more than the (until now?) apparent negligence and "not giving
> a crap" attitude from AInc's side to their allowing Eyetech to have a say in
> AmigaOS matters and the compulsory hardware licensing scheme? AmigaOS and any
> income from that gets killed off, Eyetech get to sell a bunch of severely
> marked up motherboards to us remaining devotees, AInc show their investors
> that they still need more cash to reach DE-heaven (the "Hostage
> negotiation"), and everyone's happy?
> </speculation>
Fun though it is (in a nasty sort of way) to suppose that, it's unlikely that AI deliberately screwed themselves with the hardware arrangement - not to say they didn't _incompetently_ screw themselves - you know, "Never blah blah blah conspiracy blah blah blah incompetence."
While Greg Ford's account does have a solid ring of truth to it, I have to believe that Bill & fleecy (B&f) did originally intend to run AI as a regualr business, albeit not quite how they presented it to "the community", and certainly without a clue as to how that might actually be done, but...
I give some credence to the alleged "I'm only in it for the buy-out" quote from Bill, but even in that scenario they would need to make AI look like a credible money-making (or at least technology-implementing) venture. Actually, it just occurred to me ('scuse me for being so late) that that "vision" may have been a major motivation for buddying up with MS - once they had a formal relationship, shurely it could only be one small step to "Hop right aboard, chaps! Here - grab this golden handshake..."?
Anyway, enough of that filthy stuff; as I have said before, the real lesson comes from considering how B&f sank to the depths they currently find themselves. Don't get smug, you spectators - there's plenty of us could end up in a similar position given a similar scenario.
Here's an analogy : a bunch of people standing in a room with a small water leak coming in one corner. Everybody thinks it's somebody's job to stop the leak, and somebody thinks that someone outside will turn the water off, shurely? Guess what : the water doesn't get turned off, and by the time someone thinks to try the door, the weight of water holds it shut.
There's only a limited amount of oxygen in the room, and if there's less of _them_, then there's more for _me_... Now things start to get pretty nasty, but perfectly justifiable from a strictly ego-centric perspective, of course...
Then the water reaches the ceiling, and all the nastiness stops - but it never really goes away...
Of course, the way to avoid all this was to open the door, go outside and turn the water off - but nobody thought that was their job at the time, and anyway it was cold and miserable outside, and I was furthest from the door, and why weren't those bastards outside helping, and...
Moral : Lazy and stupid is our natural state; if you don't make the continuing effort to overcome that, don't be surprised when consequences bite you on the backside.
Goodness me, did I really bother writing all that? What an utter waste of time and effort; where's the door?
And no, you can't have my analogy - it's mine, and I love it, warts 'n' all...
Gregg |
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