CompuServe Thread

A message of intent from Dr. Peter Kittel …. Mr. Schmitt, Boss of Escom, has authorized me to publish the state of affairs. Most important item first: I have my job, and it's the of the world-wide boss of engineering. Yes, I know, I start into a very difficult task, as successor of real celebrities. OTOH I had eleven years time at Commodore to study what is the wrong strategy and which leads to success. I will spend all effort to avoid these known errors. And now for the big picture: There will be founded a new, completely selfstanding daughter company of Escom AG. It will have own rooms at an own address in Heppenheim. It will be the headquarter of the new company, with control and coordination for the whole world. One subsidiary will exist in any case in the Netherlands, and it will do Europe-wide distribution and sales. Further country subsidiaries are not impossible. Yet there are no concrete decisions about UK, USA, and Canada in particular. The new company is yet to be founded, but this is currently in the works with great effort. The name is not yet decided, it will probably be something like "Commodore-Amiga" or "Amiga-Commodore" or the like. This company will (at least for the time coming) care exclusively for the Amiga model palette. As can be inferred from the first paragraph, there will be an engineering department, for hardware and OS software. For this there exist already promising contacts with well-known and well-reputated names. Yet there's no problem if someone feels obliged to send his resume (no email or fax, please) to Escom AG Personalabteilung Tiergartenstr. 9 D-64646 Heppenheim Germany You see, we consider ourselves an international company. Of course we only want the best ones :-). Further there will be a Support department which will do world-wide coordination, but also covers the german area. Thus most of these people should be german-speaking. The Amiga Developer Support Programm ADSP will get reactivated ASAP. About those developers currently using BIX or CIX, we have not yet decided. These people should feel free to contact me directly at this private account (no company one *yet* existing) and giving some input. In the past years there was a split among the developer community into different communication channels. Thus no direct communication of the developers among each other was possible, and for engineering this meant double work to explain the same issues once on one net and then additionally on another net. We will do everything to avoid this nonsense in future. There are big obstacles, as there are big cost differences in different regions of the earth, and simultaneously a high degree of confidentiality has to be maintained. – Enduser support will happen mostly in electronic form, via mailbox, Internet, and probably also Btx. Of course there will be also a Marketing department and what is needed in admin. All together this will be a rather slim company of ca. 50 people at first, but a further expansion is of course not impossible. It is planned to restart production of the last current model palette, probably in full scale, but no guarantee yet for this. Also of course not all models will appear at the same time again, one after the other. As Escom has an own poweful casing production, they will perhaps get a redesign of their styling, in any case for the A4000, but the hardware under the hood remains unchanged at first. First diverse contributing factories on earth have to revive their production of parts. New developments would mean additional months of waiting, before you could buy the products. That would be too big a sacrifice. The direction of the new engineering department will definitely be the port to some RISC platform. The choice of this RISC is still open. There are ecstatic advocats for at least two alternatives, PPC and HP PA RISC. Chris Ludwig gave an interesting interview about this. It will be the first task of engineering to prepare this choice of paths into the future with all possible expertise. It has been decided to be very liberal in regards of licensing in the future. So, whoever wants to build e.g. an Amiga Laptop or a set-top box, can get chips and OS! As you all see, much of this is still a letter of intent. The points which are declared as still open are *really* open, so there's no use in bombarding me with further questions. As my work load, at least now in the building phase, will be immense, I can't guarantee my presence on the net like before. But who knows me, knows that that would be most painful for me myself. So let's look forward.<p> In the next weeks there will be press conferences to tell more and more details. Long live the Amiga and for a good cooperation. — Best Regards, Dr. Peter Kittel // Private Site in Frankfurt, Germany \X/ Email to: peterk@combo.ganesha.com Now re-employed at The New Commodore in Heppenheim, Germany -sja