@matthey

Quote:

Jeff Porter said Medhi Ali did it twice contributing to the demise of Commodore. The most painful time was announcing the Amiga 1200 while there was a large inventory of unsold Amiga 600s. A few Amiga 1200s made it to market before Christmas but the Amiga 600s did not sell well resulting in a catastrophic Christmas season for Commodore.

From Commodore - The Final Years,

Unfortunately, when it came time to manufacture the machines,
poor planning had resulted in a shortage of crucial chips. “I recall
one mistake towards the end of Commodore where they did not
order the correct chips for the A1200, the AGA chips,� recalls Dale
Luck. “People wanted the new graphics of the A1200 and A4000, but
they didn’t order enough of the (Lisa) chips from Hewlett-Packard to
actually make a half-million of the new Amigas.�

Because there were not enough AGA chips to manufacture the
A1200, Ali went to his backup plan of manufacturing A600 systems
instead.

In early September, SCI-UK began producing A600
computers for the Christmas season. This was an odd move,
because Commodore should have been trying to clear out its
inventory of A600 systems in anticipation of the A1200 launch.

As a result, Ali’s team manufactured too many A600 computers for
the market to absorb. “There were some mistakes made with buying
a million A600s and then having to write them off,� says Dale Luck.

“They just said, ‘Well let’s just make the same ones we did a year
ago.’ But nobody wanted them. So they spent millions of dollars
making a product nobody wanted, thinking they could make people
buy it.�

The delays in opening the Philippines factory also meant the factory
was not ready to manufacture the A1200 on time. “Manufacturing in
Hong Kong had basically shut down,� recalls Colin Proudfoot.

“Manufacturing was coming out of the Philippines, which opened up
six months late because of the volcano. And then we found out in
September that the Philippines Manila Airport doesn't have the air
freight capacity to ship all the product we needed. There were two
routes: one through India and one through Tokyo out of Manila, and
we just couldn't get space on planes to bring the product over in
time for the retailers. So we missed the shipping window.�



SNES didn't have production bottlenecks like A1200s.

PC's partition graphics architecture allows unsynchronized graphics evolution pace, while Amiga's OCS/ECS to AGA shift acts like a games console generation transition.

Commodore management rejected the modular Amiga graphics architecture.

-------------------------------------
Thunderbolt/USB4-less laptop PCs also have graphics tech-driven obsolescence. I had my gaming laptop phase during the Intel Core 2 into 1st gen Core i series era, and it's not economically efficient with gaming laptops. My LAN party gaming PC is served by an ITX PC or an external GPU-connected laptop.
-------------------------------------



From Commodore - The Final Years,

The Osborne Effect

As long as all the money that flowed out for production flowed back
in by the end of the year, Commodore would have a nice balance
sheet to show the world in January.

“Hopefully by Thanksgiving or December the warehouses were empty,
and hopefully we made enough profit to cover all the costs incurred
in the prior 12 months,� says Ed Hepler.
“Hopefully by the end of the fiscal year we brought
in more money than goes out, and therefore we had a profit.�

The Osborne Effect, named after computer pioneer Adam Osborne,
is when a company prematurely announces a product while the
previous iteration is still in inventory. “You know, you tell that to a
Mehdi and he doesn't know what that means,� says Jeff Porter. “You
shouldn't be calling the shots if you don't know what Osborne
syndrome is.�

Word got out about the A1200 while Commodore had not even a
marginal number of A1200s in Europe, and NTSC A1200 production
was not slated to begin until December. “The story that I heard was
that Mehdi Ali had basically spilled the beans at a conference he
went to,� says Ed Hepler.

On October 25, 1992 a New Zealand dealer named Mark Stuart
received the specs for the A1200 in advance of the actual release.
For some reason he was not asked to sign a nondisclosure
agreement, and he posted a full description of the A1200 online. The
cat was out of the bag.

On October 27, Commodore released a position statement for the
US launch of the A1200, even though the plan had been to
announce it at the upcoming Comdex. In part it read, “This machine
has already been announced in several European countries and will
be officially announced in the U.S. at Comdex, November 16 in Las
Vegas. It is currently expected to be available in the United States
before Christmas, 1992.�

Ready or not, the computer world found out about the A1200 in
magazine previews in Europe while there were still tens of thousands
of A600 systems in production or in inventory. “In October that year
they announced the A1200, which was too late to get in stores for
Christmas but it killed the A600,� explains Colin Proudfoot. “The
market heard and said, ‘We’ll just wait for the A1200 to come out
rather than buy the A600.’ And all the Amiga magazines were telling
people don't buy the A600 because the A1200 is going to be great,
based on the specifications that we’d announced on the A1200.�
Commodore would go on to launch the product in Las Vegas in
November. “The only thing bad about the A1200 was that it was
introduced at the wrong time of year,� says Jeff Porter. “It was
introduced the day after Thanksgiving for $100 more than the A500.

It's like really? Why would you do that? Your factory is full of
A500s. You can't make enough A1200s to meet your Christmas
demand because they didn't decide early enough that they wanted
to do that. I'll be lucky if I'm in pilot production by Christmas again.�

Demand for the A600 nosedived, leaving Commodore with a
situation eerily similar to the Plus/4. “He was introducing new
products that were not in his warehouse,� laments Jeff Porter. “He
introduced the A1200 when the warehouse was chock-a-block full of
A500s and A600s.�

On December 2, SCI-UK began manufacturing the first 250 units of
the NTSC A1200. There were problems, such as the floppy drives
not fitting in the case properly. By December 14, at the World of
Commodore in Toronto, Commodore Canada didn’t even have a
demo A1200 to show.

With the A1200 barely rolling out of production in Europe, the
premature announcements killed the demand for the A600s. “They
may have had a few thousand A1200s for the world and everybody
wanted an A1200 and they couldn't get it,� says Porter. “So they
sucked wind on the Christmas quarter and when you're a consumer
electronics company that sucks wind in the Christmas quarter you're
screwed. That's when they Osborned themselves.�




From June 1991, 8 months wasted on ECS Amigas R&D and production wasn't wise.

Last edited by Hammer on 17-May-2025 at 03:32 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 17-May-2025 at 03:21 AM.

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@pavlor

Quote:

@agami Quote: years wasted for nothing Cynical mode ON You could say the same about anything Amiga related since at least 1994... Cynical mode OFF That is why I'm always wearing my rose-tinted glasses and enjoy every little bit of progress of our beloved platform. New hardware is a time for celebration, not snipe remarks.

Save your breath and don't feed the troll.

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#6 Quote:

Perhaps you already knew? But I learned something new...4 team members plus Trevor. Until now the vocal presence has been just Dave and Harald, so this is interesting to me.

No. I did not know and do not know. Did Trevor actually invest in or support the Mirari project or was this an attempt to graft his and AmigaOS 4 support in? I suspect the latter as there seems to be little interest in AmigaOS 4 support coming from the developers and owners and there has been no price drop on A1222 or X5000 hardware to sell the hardware before the more competitive Mirari board comes to market as there would likely be in a free market. AmigaOS 4 fans have this idea of Trevor as a benevolent angel investor and supporter in the Amiga and Hyperion as a Robin Hood like hero that freed the AmigaOS from oppressors. The reality may be that Trevor has a million plus USD of inventory to sell and the AmigaOS market is a controlled corrupt market that the Mirari devs are finding out. Without competitive Amiga products, it is necessary to protect malinvestments from more competitive products that have an Osborne like effect on less competitive products. THEA500 Mini and THEA1200 attempts using coercion to keep RGL, Cloanto and Amiga Corporation out of the Amiga hardware market are also examples of corrupt attempts to control the Amiga hardware market by the same Hyperion A-EonKit syndicate.

Hammer Quote:

From Commodore - The Final Years, The Osborne Effect ... The Osborne Effect, named after computer pioneer Adam Osborne, is when a company prematurely announces a product while the previous iteration is still in inventory. “You know, you tell that to a Mehdi and he doesn't know what that means,� says Jeff Porter. “You shouldn't be calling the shots if you don't know what Osborne syndrome is.� ... With the A1200 barely rolling out of production in Europe, the premature announcements killed the demand for the A600s. “They may have had a few thousand A1200s for the world and everybody wanted an A1200 and they couldn't get it,� says Porter. “So they sucked wind on the Christmas quarter and when you're a consumer electronics company that sucks wind in the Christmas quarter you're screwed. That's when they Osborned themselves.�

I found the video with Jeff Porter making similar comments.

Inside Commodore Amiga's History Part 1: Stories, Secrets & Original Lorraine Prototype at VCF East
https://youtu.be/r_AYDkuMg-U?t=2915 Jeff Porter Quote:

So remember when I told you about the CES life cycle of consumer electronics? The smoke and mirrors happens in January. You take orders in June, you build it by September, so it's on the shelf in October, November, December, and you pray to God you did the tickle me Elmo for that Christmas. So this is it was too late. You know, electronics 101, consumer electronics 101. It's been that this is they call it black Friday for a reason, right? So Medhi Ali, who was the president of the company, had done a big favor to Irving Gould, the chairman of the company to get a bunch of money to hold us over because we spent $55 million for the Amiga, bringing the Amiga to market, and we sold a whopping 77,000 of them. We needed something quick. So we did the A500. Great. Poof. We, you know, sold 4 million of those over the years. So great, we survived that. Medhi Ali still in charge. So now the finance guy believes he knows everything about marketing, everything about sales, everything about engineering, technology, science, invention, blah, blah, blah. Nothing could be further from the truth. So we're in the middle of designing the A1200. It's an awesome computer by the way. Amazing computer by the way. He introduces it, his pipeline is full of A500s and A600s. He announces the product the day after Thanksgiving and can't deliver a single one. I said, "Dude, you just Osborned the company." "What's Osborne?" So, you should because you need to sell what you have. That's sales rule number one. Sell what you have. He built an inventory for Christmas of A500s and A600s beyond belief. They would have sold just fine. But because he told that only for a few bucks more you can have an A1200, no one wanted to buy a 500 or 600. It turns into red Friday not black Friday. He did it again the second Christmas. End of Story.

Medhi Ali Osborned Commodore and the Amiga not once but twice for Christmas!

Maybe Trevor could Osborne himself if he actually was part of the Mirari team bringing it to market before selling his A1222 stock which is very much like the A600. The A600 was supposed to be the A300 but was not cancelled when the "low cost" target resulted in a "cost increase" compared to the A500 and it had "compatibility issues". The A1222 was supposed to be "low cost" hardware but it was not cancelled when it ended up being a "cost increase" compared to Sam boards and it had "compatibility issues" due to the lack of standard PPC FPU which not only decreased the competitiveness but increased development costs and in turn system costs. Medhi Ali decide to populate and produce extra A600 boards even as there was limited financing to produce the more competitive A1200. Trevor had an opportunity to sell A1222 SoCs at an elevated price due to COVID but instead doubled down and bought parts to populate the boards at elevated COVID prices. This has similarities to the original Adam Osborne business mistake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect#Criticism Quote:

On 20 June 2005, The Register quoted Osborne's memoirs and interviewed Osborne repairman Charles Eicher to tell a tale of corporate decisions that contributed to the company's demise. Apparently, while sales of the new model were relatively slow, they were starting to show a profit when a vice president discovered that there was an inventory of fully equipped motherboards for the older models worth $150,000. Rather than discard the motherboards, the vice president sold Osborne leadership on the idea of building them into complete units and selling them. Soon, $2 million was spent to turn the motherboards into completed units, and for CRTs, RAM, floppy disk drives, to restore production and fabricate the molded cases. This was far more money than anybody anticipated, and also more than the company could afford at that time. In his autobiography, Osborne described this as a case of "throwing good money after bad". It was at this time that the company folded.

Trevor, Medhi and Osborne all doubled down on less than competitive hardware and were "throwing good money after bad". The businesses led by Medhi and Oborne did not survive because the less than competitive hardware sold into a free market. Trevor survives major mistake after major mistake and continues to sell his less than competitive hardware, perhaps by keeping competitive hardware out of his market. A corrupt controlled Amiga market would be bad for the Amiga and bad for Amiga customers if people do not look for the man behind the curtain manipulating the Amiga market. Some AmigaOS 4 fans say there is no puppeteer even as evidence and suspicions mount. Perhaps the eyes of Mirari devs will be opened to the truth at least.

Last edited by matthey on 17-May-2025 at 09:32 PM.

@thread

Another Mirari update today

#6


@Matthey

I was referring to the 2 other people, not Trevor.

Last edited by number6 on 17-May-2025 at 09:33 PM.

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What they are using for a graphics card while testing the "Mirari" board?



redfox

@redfox

https://mirari.vitasys.nl/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Void_Screenshot_26012025_1024.png

AMD Cedar, which uses the TeraScale 2 architecture. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/amd-cedar.g113
Cedar based models.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?architecture=TeraScale+2&sort=generation
TeraScale 2-based models.

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@Trixie

Quote:

Trixie wrote: Tabor took so long to get done for different reasons. The primary one was, of course, the wretched SPE on the board, which took ages to write support for. The other main reason was that A-EON waited too long to start production and Covid got in he way, jacking up the price and ruining the original idea of an affordable board.

The person who advised Trevor Dickinson on the e500's non-standard FPU being suitable wasn't wise. "Reinventing the wheel" is a waste of time and resources.

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@matthey

Quote:

Mostly true. The RPi 5 provides good CPU performance/$ but the integrated GPU lags behind, the PCIe discreet GPU support is very weak and far from plug and play, NVMe on a hat connections are a weak point and inconvenient and the SoC runs hot raising the final price for cooling. Low end PC hardware is competitive in value at a little higher price.

For the desktop with Radeon-class gaming use case, RPi 5 is half-baked since it's missing a standard PCIe slot, hence RPi 5 PCIe HATS must be purchased along with the RPi 5 SBC solution pathway.

I don't recall cheapo AM4 A520 / AM5 A620 type boards for ARMv8/ARMv9 SoCs.

ASRock Rack ALTRAD8UD-1L2T (for ARM-based Ampere Altra Max/Ampere Altra LGA 4926) is not cheap.

Radxa ROCK 5 ITX doesn't have a standard PCIe slot.

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@matthey

Quote:

"Hyperion is the sole owner of AmigaOS 4" is using the word "sole" which means only or exclusive. I will substitute these synonyms of sole for sole to perhaps make it clearer. "Hyperion is the sole owner of AmigaOS 4" "Hyperion is the only owner of AmigaOS 4" "Hyperion is the exclusive owner of AmigaOS 4"

Hyperion effectively controls the "AmigaOS 4" nameplate since the core OS component is owned by other entities.

Hyperion has a contract with Amiga Inc. for AmigaOS 3.1 source code and AmigaOS nameplate usage rights.

WarpOS was intended to be used as a basis for AmigaOS 4, but Bill "marketing" McEwen
Amiga, Inc. canceled the AmigaOS 4 PPC contract with Haage & Partner in 2000. Bill "marketing" McEwen couldn't execute software project management, let alone software engineering, hence there's a weakness with Amiga IP leadership.

Gateway 2000 has similar weaknesses to other PC clone box shippers like Escom when real engineering talent is from Taiwanese ODMs.

Commodore PC clone business under Jeff Frank's administration used 3rd party chipsets for its PC clones, hence, Jeff Frank is less qualified to lead a graphics chipset design house i.e. Amiga systems engineering group.

Last edited by Hammer on 21-May-2025 at 03:47 AM.

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@thread

Another Mirari update

#6

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@number6

Keep it coming!

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@matthey

Quote:

150 CPUs 10 FPGAs 50 PCBs 70 small items 150 software licenses 150 items for the complete system 150 government costs 150 warranty, etc. So it'll definitely be a 999 euro box.

From https://www.nxp.com/part/T1042NSN7PQB

T1042NSN7PQB (quad-core e5500 @ 1.4GHz) has $89.56 USD budgetary price for 100 unit orders.

Without economies of scale, the asking price is not competitive.

Organizing a group purchase action would help.

Last edited by Hammer on 23-May-2025 at 01:40 AM.

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@thread

Another Mirari update

#6

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@number6

That is absolutely great news. I’m hoping AmigaOS 4.1 is not far behind.

_________________

@AmigaMac

The development cycle should be a lot shorter thant the X1000 to X5000 transition.

The T1042 is basically a cut down P5040. So most of the work required to support the Mirari should revolve around adapting the X5000 bootloader and kernel to work with the new board.

The X5000 drivers for Ethernet, USB2 and SATA 2 should work out of the box so the only new drivers required would be for USB3, NVME and the onboard audio, none which are essential for a public releases since you could have fully usable system just by adding a PCIe sound card and sticking with SATA drives.

@Rob

Quote:

Rob wrote: @AmigaMac The development cycle should be a lot shorter thant the X1000 to X5000 transition. ..... The X5000 drivers for Ethernet, USB2 and SATA 2 should work out of the box so the only new drivers required would be for USB3, NVME and the onboard audio, none which are essential for a public releases since you could have fully usable system just by adding a PCIe sound card and sticking with SATA drives.

The benchmark for that process has been set at 7 days

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@Kronos

Quote:

The benchmark for that process has been set at 7 days

Nice! I thought it would be fairly trivial but didn't want to suggest something too over optimistic in on the forums. No excuse now for OS4 not to be ready when the boards go into production.

@Rob

Is there anything equivalent to the Mirari blog showing OS4 intent/progress for the Mirari?

#6

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@Rob

I’m hoping the development is in the works. This will be great for the Amiga platform at large.

_________________

@thread



#6

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