CEO of Amiga, Inc. Interviewed

vlangber submitted an interview with Bill McEwen about the current state of Amiga, Inc. and their plans for the future. Bill says, "[W]e established the concept and vision of a scalable, embeddable, multi-threaded, memory protected operating system or digital environment that would run from a cell phone to a server. This is what you are going to see us deliver." While Amiga OS4 has been in pre-release since 2004, a final release is planned for later this year.

Why "Amiga"?

[deanj]

Back in the day, I was a big Amiga fan. And like most Amiga folks, I had multiple machines. They were great.

Commodore really screwed up with the marketing. It was like plot of "The Producers"... do everything you can to make it fail.

Now it's yet again, "Wait until you see what we have planned!" Reminds me of the old days.

Whatever this company is doing, it's "Amiga" in name only. They really need to change the name and let "Amiga" die with whatever shred of respect that great machine once had.

The old screen pull down trick?

[joetheappleguy]

Can it do the old Amiga trick of grabbing the menu bar and pulling down to reveal the window below it, which could actually be of a different screen resolution?

This may sound like a small, silly thing to stick on, but it does work to remind me that the Amiga was a unique combination of clever programming AND clever hardware at a special time in computing history - What makes this new Amiga an Amiga beyond just sharing a name?

I hope it's not Guru Meditations...

Uphill battle, I'm afraid

[BadAnalogyGuy]

They are attacking the problem as the underest underdog. But just from the quote in the summary, I can predict they will need to change that guy before they can succeed.

No company ever got successful with a single product that was applicable to all levels of possible applicability. Microsoft is successful because it makes ubiquitous desktop software, not because Windows XP is modular and its kernel lightweight and fast and embeddable. Sun makes a great VM that really runs well on servers, but it's not exactly a common language among the masses. IBM's AS400 is a pretty neat system, but I wouldn't want it as my mom's computer.

You need to pick your niche and carve it out before you go about trying to make your product ubiquitous. Success comes when people see your product and know immediately where it is applicable. Growth comes when you get them to see it applicable to their domain as well. However, if they don't see the first part, they won't accept the second part.

I knew a photographer who was pretty decent at any sort of photography that a client could dream up. From detailed macro work to poster-quality landscape work, this guy did it all. He had to do it as a hobby because he couldn't get enough work from his clients. He decided to nail down what his acceptable project type was and decided on industrial equipment photography. He can't take a vacation or spend his millions of dollars in profits because his phone is always ringing with new offers for work. By limiting his range of work, he became much more visible to those people who would hire him. Until he did that, he was just another guy among the crowd.

Amiga is just another guy among the crowd.

Re:The old screen pull down trick?

[Bing Tsher E]

Yes, the Amiga proved what could be done with clever programming and a whole board full of specialized ASIC chips. Which was completely unscalable to the real world of commodity hardware and software. It was a really cool 'boutique' machine.

'Clever' never scales very well, because clever design digs in to take advantage of warts and shine them into features.

In essence, that is why the Amiga could foster a loud proud subculture of users, and also why it could never grow beyond said loud proud subculture.

Fanboism and the Amiga's death

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember around the days of the Video Toaster, people refusing to buy Amigas just due to the rabid fanboism of the so-called "Amigaoids". It was even worse than the Mac fans on Digg who make multiple sock puppet accounts just to click thumbs-down on anyone saying anything bad about their deity/computer maker.

Eventually, because there wasn't a real clear description to people what was so good about the Amiga other than "cool sound, cool graphics... OMG, look how FAST it bounces this ball around the screen with 10 apps open !!!!11!!!111one". Being loyal to something is great, but pretty much most people care about is if its going to do the job they need it to, be it AV work, word processing, or a data dump for their business's mailing list. Pure irrational evangalism drove a lot of people away from the Amiga.

I know almost nobody who is a PC fanboi, its just a solution that gets the job done in a decent manner. The old adage, "nobody has gotten fired for buying IBM." is a sad one, but people rather buy "standard" PCs than be stuck with they believe is a marginal platform, that may be a dinosaur.

This is not serious

[cecom]

This seems like some kind of a scam. What can one think after reading this:

9.) Will OS5 be based on any code from OS3 or OS4?

BM>> I would prefer not answering this at this time. As we are ready to release more information it will become a much clearer picture.

10.) Will OS5 have a full-blown Java VM?

BM>> Wait and see. We have some pretty interesting plans with regard to Java.

11.) Will OS5 be a 64-bit OS, i.e. run on 64-bit CPUs, with a 64-bit address space? What about memory protection?

BM>> I would prefer not answering this at this time. As we are ready to release more information it will become a much clearer picture.

13.) In the Amiga.Org answers, you said that OS5 didn't use Tao technology, yet you also stated that OS5 would run on multiple CPU architectures. How do you support different CPU families without the Tao technology? Fat binaries?

BM>> You support them in the method and way that we are going to support them.

It is obvious that either this guy has no idea at all of what is going on, or that he is lying and there is no development at all, the latter being much more likely. I read the other interview linked from the article and it was full of the same nonsense - definitely not anything that I'd expect from a serious business let alone its CEO. It is completely ridiculous.

Although I respect what Amiga was in the past (although I never personally used it), my advice to the Amiga fans and hobbyists is to forget about this "company". Amiga is dead.

I was..

[JustNiz]

a hardcore Amiga fan back in the day. So were all my friends. I loved my Amiga 500... it got me through a CS degree when there was little to no chance of getting enough time on the departments own systems to do my project. And wow what an operating system... it made Windows 3.1 look positively stupid. The Amiga defined and fit the zeitgeist of that time perfectly and will always hold a special place in my heart. Then there was the day Amiga corp. died (to the tune of bye-bye Ms. American pie). All us CS nerds felt like Elvis had just died. I stayed with my Amiga for years after, even though the parent company were long gone. It had a special place for me as it had unfailingly been there for me when I needed it and we had been through some of the best times of my life together. However eventually it was beyond impossible to deny any more that my little buddy had seen his day and I sadly moved over to PC.

However, now is not then, and we're all grown-up now with our business laptops. Where on earth can Amiga find a market now? They're not even close to being the same company or attempting to appeal to the same market. Is the market demnographic that defined the original Amiga buyer even still there?

Even the Amiga vision and sense of community has been fulfilled by Linux, which has unassailable advantages over Amiga Os and any other commercial product in that you can download for free and install on the hardware that you have already. I would love to see Amiga OS on sale again but I'm not sure even I could really find a need for it other than some misplaced sense of nostalgia, which would probably fade as soon as I booted it and realised I didn't recognise the new AmigaOs at all. Another nice OS with no third parties writing apps or games for it? If I wanted that I'd buy OS/X.

Re:Why "Amiga"?

[kfg]

They really need to change the name and let "Amiga" die with whatever shred of respect that great machine once had.

I feel the same way about Bugatti, but at least VW actually delivers product instead of talk.

KFG

good luck

[Jeek Elemental]

Its a real shame the Amiga fizzled, it had a great many things going for it. Pretty amazing what they made a 7.14MHz machine with 512k ram do, imagine what it would be like today if they hadnt screwed up :) The community at its peak was awesome, never seen anything like it since. Good luck to the new owners!

Re:The old screen pull down trick?

[Threni]

> What makes this new Amiga an Amiga beyond just sharing a name?

Nothing. It's like Atari. It's like any name which can be traded long after the people responsible for the name have been sacked, resigned, died etc.

Re:I was..

[DrunkenPenguin]

Even the Amiga vision and sense of community has been fulfilled by Linux

Exactly. And you know why that has happened? It's because the creativity is there within the Linux community. Linux coders have free hands to do whatever they want to and create freely whatever comes to their mind without any deadlines. This is why commercial software will eventually fail - nowadays shareholders want more and more done within less and less time - this will result in bad code. Linux is free of all that crap. Nobody is pushing Linux coders, they have the time to make it right. They have the time to be creative. It's not possible to do that anymore if you're a coder in some software company. There are deadlines and shareholders that are making your job miserable.

Cell used by PS3, 360, AND Wii???

[Anonymous Coward]

What's this guy smoking?

"20.) There has been a lot of debate in the Amiga community, in
the last couple of years, about the choice to make OS4 for PPC. After Apple switched to x86, the PPC is dead as a desktop CPU. Yet in the 25 questions you said that OS4 would never move away from PPC, and that you'd have to wait for OS5 to run AmigaOS on x86. One of the Frieden brothers estimated that a port to x86 could be done in only a few months (twice the time to port to a new PPC platform), and it would solve the hardware availability issues permanently. Given those facts, what's the reasoning behind the decision to stay with the PPC?

BM>> The Cell processor is used by Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii (stupid name by the way), and Playstation 3. There are numerous other high end graphics and multi-media devices coming out in the coming months that use Cell, and Cell is PPC. There is a great deal of opportunity staying with PPC and expect that with the conversations that we have had with Freescale, and IBM, that there are several OEM's that are interested in what we have planned as well."

Too late

[Carrot007]

I loved my amiga back in the day.

However in 1996/7 I went PC out of a need for more.

I've tried various other OS's over the years but have not been convinced.

Since OSX 10.4 things however have been different. Back i the day i used to head-butt mice to pretend to be a mac user in a derogatory way, however my new mac mini and macbook fill the extra the amiga used to provide in my computing life.

Yeah I still have a windows box for gaming and a kubuntu server for stuff but my macs provide my general computer needs and that sence of fun that was otherwise missing.

Should amiga release something i may bve tempted but i know its as much amiga as some company that buys some dead companies name to try and get ahead.

Times change, this does not mean new amiga will be bad, just not new amiga.

Anyway OSX is here and now and nice!

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[mdwh2]

All of that could, of course, be said for a Mac ("classic", not OS X). Do I see people posting that to every Apple article?

Re:Fanboism and the Amiga's death

[mdwh2]

Did this comment slip out of a wormhole from a 1990 PC-vs-Amiga flamewar?

Really - whilst there may be plenty of Amiga or ex-Amiga fans here, if you read through this thread, I have yet to see anyone defending or supporting what this particular current company are planning. So in other words, your claim of fanboism is completely out of date, and a strawman.

And were there Amiga fanbois in the 1990s? Yes there were - just as there were for DOS/Windows, MacOS and Linux, the only difference being that those fanbois are still around to annoy people. (Yes, there are plenty of Windows fanbois.) It's absurd to suggest that they drove people away on any platform.

But what really worries me is that fanbois like yourself of other platforms are still here, 10-20 years later, still trying to keep up an anti-Amiga argument ("OMG who cares about bouncing balls") even though there is no one arguing this with you!

The old adage, "nobody has gotten fired for buying IBM." is a sad one, but people rather buy "standard" PCs than be stuck with they believe is a marginal platform, that may be a dinosaur.

Do me a favour and post that to the next Apple article.