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[ilgulamc]

Hello everybody,

I still remember like it was yesterday when Collas took over the Amiga and the excitement, things really looked like they where going to change.

Then all of a sudden he left and then was the chaos, Gateway promoted Tom Schmidt to fill the vacant place as vice President and COO, but even those days it was obvious that this was a move to sell Amiga or to just let it go off.

Now, many years have gone by, and I'm sure that something important (and that was kept confidential) happened for Jim Collas to leave Amiga. Did they fired him, did he leave because he got in a fight with Ted Waitt? Did he see the dot com revolution real direction and left because that was the only way to sell his stock options at a reasonable price. Do you know something more?

Here you can find a short article about him leaving.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-515585.html

I’m curious to know your opinions.

Thanks

[Argus]

Conspiracy theorists have it M$ told Waitt to put an end to Collas' Amiga dream. Who knows for sure?

[CannonFodder]

A tale of XBox plans and threats of loss of cheap OEM Windows 98 licences scuppered Amiga.

[cv643d]

is there any thruth in that?!

[Terse]

cv643d wrote:
is there any truth in that?!

No. But folks here repeat it often enough and so someone will likely pop it up onto Wikipedia and a few other sites, then others will point to these sites as proof and make it into a "truth."

The real truth behind Gateway's actions may or may not have been revealed, but if you follow this industry, you can take a good guess:

1) Gateway was getting into set-top boxes and multimedia living room devices at this time.

2) Lots of others were getting into this too. Some were further along.

3) Patent Law makes innovation really difficult. It's hard to make a device that pulls together multiple ideas without having some of those ideas be patented. Once you release your product, the patent holders come out of the woodwork to get their share of your hard work.

4) Companies like Dell and Microsoft brag that their real value is in their massive backlog of patents. Consider this: You are Microsoft. You make a whizz-bang app or device, but a company comes and sues you showing that they had patented a part of the idea you at MS made into a product. Time to pay up, right?
Well, how about this: Microsoft's Lawyers discover that the company suing them also builds MP3 players, and these players use the FAT file management process. FAT is ubiquitous but is MS property and patented. So, as MS, you make a deal. Drop the patent lawsuit and grant us rights to use the technology, and we will grant you the right to use FAT, rather than countersuing! Problem solved!

5) Commodore-Amiga had patents on lots of little bits and parts of manufacturing and video display that predate similar patents from many other companies. If you are Gateway and you want to be somewhat protected from other patent holders while having some patent ammo in your back pocket, the asking price for Commodore-Amiga's IP would have been a bargain.

6) Amiga was still somewhat viable when Gateway bought it, they naturally would have given some thought to continuing Amiga itself, but this would have been secondary to the real goal of obtaining the patents.

7) Amiga's value was in the patents, not the computer business. Frankly, Gateway would probably love to have a scapegoat to blame for axing the company: "Hey! We tried but MS/the Mafia/UFOs/Karl Rove/etc. bullied us!"
As it stands today, they got off pretty easy without too much backlash for personally putting the final coffin nail in the hopes of Amiga.

[ilgulamc]

@all:

Ok, this explains why Gateway did what they did with amiga. But my question was not about Gateway, it was about JIM COLLAS, a man who worked for many years as a top manager for Gateway and all of a sudden left the company.

Not only, Gateway licensed the amiga name to amino, but even though Collas looked very positive about the amiga/linux solution, when he left he didn't turn back to amino.

Now, I seem to remember something like McEwen or Fleecy beeing fired by Gateway, during or before the Collas era, and this could be the reason why Collas didn't want to get in business with them.

What do you think? (about Collas, not Gateway!)

[Jose]

Collas was gonna kill AmigaOS and use Linux. A lot of Amiga users lost in that time, still remember the heated discussions on forums.
Good thing that he left.

[TheMagicM]

Collas opened/runs/whatever a venture capital firm. www.ideaedge.com


interesting graphic on this page:

http://www.ideaedge.com/website/edge/index.htm

[Tigger]

Collas slept with one of the Annex girls at the show before he was fired, Ted Waite and he got in a fight about his married president of Amiga Inc sleeping with what was basically an employee of gateway at the show. Collas left.
-Tig

[cv643d]

lol

[uncharted]

Jose wrote:
Collas was gonna kill AmigaOS and use Linux. A lot of Amiga users lost in that time, still remember the heated discussions on forums.
Good thing that he left.

No, he was planning to base the new AmigaOS around the Linux Kernal rather than the QNX Kernal.

Seeing how a similar plan worked out for Apple (and as long as the user facing stuff was Amiga-like) it was a shame that it never came about.

[uncharted]

Tigger wrote:
Collas slept with one of the Annex girls at the show before he was fired, Ted Waite and he got in a fight about his married president of Amiga Inc sleeping with what was basically an employee of gateway at the show. Collas left.

Bloody hell. I've been exposed to so much shenanigans in the Amiga world, I actually can't work out if you are joking or not. :-o

[Tigger]

uncharted wrote:

Bloody hell. I've been exposed to so much shenanigans in the Amiga world, I actually can't work out if you are joking or not. :-o

Read Moobunny from the time he left, its not like it was a secret.
-Tig

[FluffyMcDeath]

Tigger wrote:
Collas slept with one of the Annex girls at the show before he was fired,[...]

Which one? Was she HOT?

[Reynolds]

Photos anywhere? ofcourse about the girls, not Collas