[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.
|
|
List of all comments to this article |
Hostage Negotiation : Comment 235 of 260 | ANN.lu |
Posted by samface on 02-Feb-2004 09:37 GMT | In reply to Comment 233 (Oppressor): >Sitting on the name only protects the painfully slow development at Hyperion.
>90% of the work is done in 10% of the time, and the remaining 10% of the work
>consume 90% of the time and resources available. The slowness at Hyperion
>causes enormous damage to the "Amiga thing" as a whole, and by that I mean
>people who have bought AmigaOnes, Pegasoses, who are using their old Amigas or
>different operating systems (like myself), and who are just waiting. If we're
>losing only one of the "beneficial" people per week and one "beneficial"
>developer per month to outside platforms, then we're running out of resources
>shortly.
I'm sorry but I disagree that Hyperion would be making slow progress. How long did it take for bPlan to accomplish MorphOS v1.0? The MorphOS project was started in 1997, 5 years later MorphOS v1.0 was released. Then let's compare with another AmigaOS clone project; AROS. Do I need to say more?
Seriously, is two or three years in development really that much for an OS project? I don't think so.
>The problem with the Hyperion development is that it is (to industrial
>standards) organized unprofessionally - not only that the release dates were
>haphazard, leave alone that they now refuse to give release dates at all.
The release dates is a painful reminder of what should have happened if the Amiga market would have decided to cooperate instead of competing against each other. The expectations for these release dates where unjustly transferred to Hyperion, who basicly had to start over from scratch with nothing instead of what should have been already accomplished by then. Too sad that there are too many egoes in this business...
>There are also haphazard decisions in what will be included to 4.0, 4.1, 4.2,
>5.0.
???
>And during all the time OS4 is in the Vapour Awards.
Thanks for the publicity, Nate.
>Thanks to Amiga Inc., who obviously failed to organize and support this work
>professionally.
Well, I'd say it wouldn't be correct to put all the blame one just one of the involved parties in this mess.
>Hyperion, on the other hand, are not to be criticized. They need only a few
>hundered OS4 units to provide them with almost guaranteed sales program of
>game ports in the next years.
I wouldn't say just a few hundred, but of course Hyperion expect certain benefits from selling AmigaOS4, and they deserve it, IMO.
>At the same time, vast amounts of proven competence in "Amiga-like"
>development is sunk in MorphOS and Genesi. Hey, they did no less than to prove
>that they can develop an Amiga-lookalike OS - with the help of AROS people
>though, where another large amount of energy is being spent.
Yes, I agree. This energy would have been so much better spent on a unified effort.
>My proposal for solution would be as follows:
<snip>
I'm afraid that I once more don't agree. I don't believe in an open source AmigaOS nor the Amiga as open hardware standard, never did. The different branches taken by the former Amiga community is bad enough as it is, the only way for the Amiga to survive is through unity and as one defacto standard. As I see it, the beginning of our demise was the Haage&Partner vs Phase5 war. The split in the AmigaPPC market was devastating and basicly turned my PowerPC 603e accelerator into my worst waste of perfectly good money ever. I would have been much better off with a 68060, a mediator, and a VoodooIII graphics card.
So you see, the efforts by Phase5 and bPlan, which is basicly the same people, is worth exactly zero to me. On the contrary, I strongly believe we would have been better off without them. |
|
List of all comments to this article (continued) |
|
- User Menu
-
- About ANN archives
- The ANN archives is powered by #AmigaZeux. It was updated daily (news last: 22-Oct-2004; comments last: 18-May-2005).
ANN.lu was created, previously owned and maintained by Christian Kemp, www.ckemp.com.
- Contribute
- Not possible at this time!
- Search ANN archives
- Advanced search
- Hosting
- ANN.lu was hosted by Dreamhost. Sign up through this link, mention "ckemp" as referrer and he will get a 10% commission on any account you purchase.
Please show your appreciation for any past, present and future work on ANN.lu by making a contribution via PayPal.
|