[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 239 of 260 | ANN.lu |
Posted by samface on 02-Feb-2004 18:12 GMT | In reply to Comment 237 (Oppressor): >I didn't want to imply that the MorphOS people gang was faster or smarter. I
>know how much time it takes to accomplish software development in large
>scales. Hyperion, as professionals, should've known about the 90:10 ratio as
>well. Either they were not as highly qualified for software development as
>they believed they were, or they may have been overly optimistic for other
>reasons. It's not the slowness in itself which I criticize, but the
>unprofessional approach. Read the comments at amigaworld.net to see how badly
>AmigaOne owners suffer from their waiting. And the wait isn't over yet. It
>would've been better to not give release dates from the start.
Ok, here's the deal:
Amiga Inc. spent their first 9 months in office negotiating, the idea was to try uniting the Amiga community and make use of the many talents and resources as a unified effort to ressurect the more than 10 year old Amiga corpse. I suspect that the announcement that they would abandon the classic Amiga product line was more strategic than sincere, inspired by how Gateway got Haage&Partner and Phase5 to actually cooperate with each other for the sake of trying to save the Amiga PPC market.
Anyway, during those negotiations, the community kept pressuring Amiga Inc. to release information about their plans and release dates. At this time, Amiga Inc. may have been naive and thought that the negotiating partners dedication to the platform would be strong enough to make certain compromises. For this reason, they made announcements based on the assumption that the negotiations would be successful. They were wrong. The negotiations failed and the only cooperating partners that remained after this major setback was Eyetech and Hyperion.
Now, while it may have been better to be honest in our user point of view, it's not always that easy if you are dependant on investments like Amiga Inc. was, and still is.
>On the other hand, the OS4 crew has a lot of original sources at hand and
>doesn't need to rewrite everything from scratch. If you are now tempted to
>draw the Secret Master Weapon: The AmigaOS is an aesthetic, but very simple
>design. Many people could rewrite it from scratch nowadays, with just the
>knowledge of its API and inner working, which is very well accessible to
>every kind of inspection. I'm referring to the sheer amount of code that eats
>up the time.
>
>Three years isn't much time for OS development. Three years late for a PPC
>port is devastating.
It's far from just a port to PPC. Have you read the AmigaOS4.0 feature set? It's right here:
http://os.amiga.com/os4/OS4FeatureSet.php
I'm sure you will find it an interesting read.
>The sources laid 10 years in deep slumber, but they weren't gone. I really
>don't see it. Sure, hardware drivers, these are a lot of fun, which Hyperion
>should've known beforehand. I consider the rest of the OS (recompiling
>existing C and porting existing 68k code to C) a time-consuming, but
>straightforward and easy job. Olaf Barthel already did the Filesystem and
>contributed a TCP stack. The rest isn't exactly rocket science, with the
>sources at hand.
All sources were far from C. Some parts of the Amiga operating system were indeed written in C, but the larger part was still in MC68000 assembly code. DOS was even written in BCPL as a reminder of the AmigaOS TRIPOS heritage.
It would make more sense to say that AmigaOS4 is a rewrite rather than a port, while the truth is probably somewhere in between. In any case, I surely wouldn't call it a "straightforward and easy job". But then, you're more of a programming expert than me, I could be wrong.
>If I remember correctly, more and more features were taken from later 4.x
>releases into the initial release. My evil conspiracy theory is that this
>project entirely got out of control, and that they needed backup excuses.
Well, as a theory I cannot prove it right nor wrong. However, have you ever heard of such thing as a planned feature set that would have never been revised from day one until finalization?
>I don't want to forget anything, but to come to simple calculations, like
>
>Genesi vs. Amiga: -1 : -1
>
>and then successively remove these arguments from being cooking up over and
>over again. :)
Agreed. =)
>Oh well, it is STILL possible that AROS will be the only survivor in a couple
>of years. Neither would that appear to be the least probable nor the worst
>scenario to me.
It sure is no impossibility, but not far from a worst case scenario to me.
>> 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.
>
>Fully agreed. I only believe that all commercial entities sunk too deeply to
>handle that burden anymore. Without the name being the protective shield for
>Hyperion, OS4 development would be immediately crushed by reality. If Amiga
>Inc. would be the weakest member of the chain, what would happen without
>them, who's the owner of the name then? Is it free? Does it belong to
>Gateway? Can I attend an auction in the U.S. and buy it then?
That's speculation out of my leauge, I'm afraid.
>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.
>
>Yes, that's well possible. And nowadays we would be better off without Amiga
>Inc., which would result in the first -1 : -1 notch on my woodblock. :)
I'm not so sure about that. I mean, they coughed up those $5 million it cost to buy the Amiga trademark and intellectual property in order to secure it from ending up in Gateway's archives, doomed to an eternity of uncertainty. And then they spent 9 months of negotiations in order to secure the continuation of the classic Amiga product line, even sacrificed the legal rights to the OS in case they would end up in insolvency. Do you realize how much this has cost them vs the tiny revenue they will make from AmigaOne and AmigaOS4 sales? Do you think any other company in the Amiga market would be willing to do the same?
Well sure, there is quite a few things that could have been done differently if they would have known what we know today. However, atleast it's quite appearant to me that they did things for the right reasons and I just wish things would have turned out a little different than they did. |
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