This article may seem a little out of date, but I think a lot of people out there will be very interested at what Jeff Schindler, General Manager of Amiga Inc had to say at the Computer 97 show held in late November. Well, below is a complete transcript of the Jeff Schindler's speech to Developers from Amiga News. Enjoy.
Jeff: I talked to RJ Mical a lot and he sent me a vidéo of the original Amiga designers. I sat up with my wife one night and watched it and it really gave me a feeling of how special the Amiga is. No-one realises it unti you get involved, and then it sucks you right into what it is. When we sat down and watched the original guys and the passion they had and the drive that they had... it wasn't to make money, it was to do something special and make a change. It really really made me proud to think that I could stand up here as General Manager of Amiga Inc and address you. So, you have the energy, and from that I get lots of emails, lots of phone calls, people come in, and it continues to bring up my spirit and make me understand what Amiga's all about. A lot of questions I get is: who is Jeff Schindler? I'm a common guy, and the reason I have a bit of sweat on my brow is that I've been to just about every building in this plafce before I found the "club". And the fact is I'm a common guy because, I was smart most of this trip, and I came here with my wife Kim who's in the back - she's turning away - (laughter) she's gonna kill me for that - and I let her do the navigating until tonight. I said I know where the club is... Wrong... So I know that I need to listen to people, and that's one of the largest things that I've understood about Amiga, it is a community, it is about people, and they have a lot of input. And one of the reasons of the frustration of where we're at is because we want to get as much input as possible before we make our plans for the next year, the year after, and four years out. Amiga Inc is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gateway 2000, and we always put that we are independant, and Gateway wants it to be that way. One of the reasons is just because Amiga is so much different from Gateway's business that we need to be independant. We are headquartered in South Dakota and we do have a vision, our vision is to become a worldwide standard technology for convergence products, technology that's recognised throughout the world. One of the reasons that I was selected for this job is that when I went to Gateway my previous life was in portables, and Gateway's portables were OK, so when Ted (Waitt, Gateway founder and Chief Executive Officer) asked me to do portables I said "Well Ted I'm a little tired of doing portables I'd rather be doing the next thing", so he asked me "What's the next thing" and I replied "I don't know". He said "Go ahead and figure out what it is". So we did some research and came up with the invention of Destination, which is really one of the world first PCTVs to integrate consumer-like products and computing all in the one package, so you have stereo, you have digital TV and video and all that stuff works together. It was a concept, and one of the issues was: if you weren't comfortable with a PC , were you ever going to buy the product? We worked hard in the PC world where I was from to always try to take that PC and make it lower cost and easier to use, and every year, as you well know, they come out and they're more expensive - well, in some cases - and they're always more complex. So, if we're really going to be a standard worldwide we need to achieve those goals. Some more of my background: my first computer was a Commodore Vic20. I was all excited, I was in college in electrical engineering, and we were married and we were out of money, as many college students are, and I went to work for a company, actually my salary was paid for by Commodore, Atari, Texas Instruments, all the companies that we in the homle computer business back then. What I would do was go around the different retail places and train them on new products and help them to understand how to sell computer products... I remember bringing home my Vic 20 and started programming straight away, and in about four hours I ran out of memory.... I went from that to the 64 and so on and so on. So it was really cool to come back to the original stuff with my PC background and that...
How are we going to execute this vision? Basically, we are the research and development company and that's what we're going to concentrate on. So we're really really concertrating on: What is the future? And that's another reason why it's taking longer. I don't want to come out with something in six months and then another in a year and find out oh shoot we should've really walked down this path and now we're going to have to change everything in two years. We want to make sure that everything that's been created so far, the legacy and everything that's behind it, can be carried forward and at the same time we can be at or above the industry standards in technology and state of the art. And that's not an easy thing to do, especially with technology moving so fast, so we're spending a lot of time working with a lot of companies, looking at a lot of technologies and saying "Does this fit, and how does it fit, and when does it fit?" The other thing we need to do, as I said before, is really leverage people like yourself, and understand what you're seeing out there, what you want to develop to, what do you think the market's going to do. That is the key. One of the great things is, we feel like we're a startup company, but we've got this huge backing even before we start, and this huge following. Most other companies don't have that.
OEM, software, application partners.
Basically, you're not going to buy a computer unless it has content, you're not
going to buy a big video editing machine unless it has software and content. That
is key, and if we don't sign up more and more software partners we're not going
to survive.
The other thing is, we'll work hand in hand with Petro to take the future
technology and help to licence that and work that through to the actual OEMs.
Our business is to be in the future of Amiga's technology. We're not really in the
product business, I want to make that clear right now. What we're doing is we're
trying to move the technology forward and come up with a core architecture so
that OEMs and whoever would like to take the core Amiga architecture could take
that and build whatever product they want. That's what we're in the business for,
so another thing that's going to be tough for us is to try to control, at the core
level, compatibility, both with what's being developed with software content and
with what's being developed in the hardware area, so that when you see that Boing
ball on a piece of software, or on a box or on a computer, or whatever you come
up with, you know that that works with that. And that's our goal.
Research
So the first we do is do research. We try to understand the current technology with
its strengths and weaknesses. Where we're at with that, again, more research and
feedback from yourselves and the rest of the world. Understanding the market
trends, and the end users, and how their lives are changing and what they'd like to
do next. That's critical.
Understanding industry standards. If we come out with something neat and
everyone else is using something different for their video and coding and decoding
that doesn't make a lot of sense, so we want to make sure that we understand
those things.
Then we want to understand technology. Basically the way I do product planning is:
you understand the market trends, what people are doing and where they are
going, you understand the technology that's happening and advancing, and the
intersection is when you come up with a great product or a core technology. That's
a pretty simple approach but that seems to work. If you have a technology that's
before what people want it doesn't make sense, if you have a market and the
technology's old...
Strengths
Right now it's very compact, the OS and the hardware architecture, it's efficient and
it's reliable. If you look at some of the alternatives, especially in the business I was
in before, we know a lot about reliability. If you go to print something at the same
time, if you're opening something else up and you've got two or three other
applications going there's a good chance these other side of the fence that I was on
before will crash. That's one of the things that we have and they've been trying to
do forever, and the more they make things complex the harder it is for them to do
that.
Multitasking: I'm amazed. We had NewTek in, and we had the video editor up
there, and it's doing all kinds of wonderful things that they're using for TV ads and
movies. And Joe Torres is sitting there and he says "Watch this", and he's running a
million things at the same time and there's no slowing down of the Amiga, it was
amazing. We like to bring that down when everyone wants to see what the Amiga
is and its like
Auto configuration: I remember when the PC world came out with plug'n'play and
we called it plug'n'pray. They are still trying to figure out what that is. In fact
there's a lot of things they did that were auto this and auto that but you'll find in
the newer versions they took them out.
Video and graphics: it is absolutely incredible to see what some of these machines
can do with 2 megabytes or four megabytes of memory. I was just shocked to see
some of this stuff. It was incredible.
Basically, you're always trying to develop a machine that costs less and has more
functionality, I think that the Amiga has the base to be one of the leaders in that.
You can use a TV or a monitor.
The architecture can be used for very small devices and it can be used for very
high-end devices, and there are very few architectures that are really like that. We
want to take advantage of that.
Support: the architecture is backed by so many people.
Weaknesses
Technology: it was way ahead of its time, but the technology is at least four years
old, and that's something that we need to recognize in a lot of areas and get it
moving forward.
The user interface is again that old, and if we're going to bring it into people's
households or use it in a kiosque or whatever these things have to be as easy as
point and click. We can support several user interfaces: a sophisticated user interface
for the enthusiasts, but we also have to have something for those who say "I'm
never getting a computer in my house" and then we need to show them something
to try, and they look at it and they say "Well, that's an Amiga, what does it do?"
So we say "Would you like to go on the net?" and click, they're on the net, or
"Would you like to play a game?" and click, they're playing a game.
Applications: since Commodore has gone bankrupt we all know that there's been
less and less developers and that makes sense because people are looking for
volume. So we've got to get the products out there, we've got to get the
technology moving forward so we'll start to see more developers, anywhere from
single developers to very large companies, supporting the Amiga.
Motorola's lack of moving the 68000 family forward: We're talking with Motorola
and we're trying to understand what we need to do there, with either that family
or the next family or something else to make sure that we're up to speed there.
Lack of state of the art hardware:. all of the chips are made with technology that
was processed four or five years ago. Those things can be done in a much cheaper
way today, and much more efficient and there's a lot of features we need to add.
Lack of industry attention, just because there hasn't been a lot going on, so one of
the other goals is to make sure that Amiga is recognised in the consumer and in
the commercial market as one of the leading technologies. It's interesting about
Amiga, you either know everything about it or you know nothing about it. So
we've got to get those people who know nothing about it to say "Hey, I've seen
that boing ball..."
Research
Part of the research is going back to some of the originators, understanding what
they think should go next, see what their recommendations are. All these people we
have listed here: Carl, RJ, Dale, Ed are all working with us, they're all there as
consultants, advisors, they may even do work for us, but at this point it's great
because just about everybody has said: whatever you need I'll be there for you.
Interaction with developers.
The ICOA has been very active in trying to be the in-between between what we're
doing and understanding what's going on in the development field and filtering
back and forth things. At this point this isn't official, but this is the proposal.
Basically you can see that we have proposed a steering committee and right now
what's being proposed is someone from the users groups, two people representing
software developers, a person representing the public domaine and shareware field,
and then someone from Amiga Inc actually sitting on a steering committee. Then
there's working groups and a membership committee that would basically all work
together.
The actual developers, large small and independant people, would all filter through
there, and in some cases, some other companies we would have to work directly
with...
We can't work with everybody, we want to be an efficient, small company, really
dedicated to technology, and so we do need something between us to worth those
issues. On your survery you have questions about this, I'd like your feedback.
Survey from the MidWest Amiga Show in Ohio
Most of the people were software developers, probably because the chips haven't
been updated in a long time. The bulk of the people said they would like to see
between 70-90% of legacy applications still supported in a new generation. There
was a small group that said legacy is not important to us, and another small group
that wanted 100% compatibility with legacy applications. I was very happy with
that feedback. We would like to keep a large percent of the legacy and at the same
time move the technology forward. That means that the legacy piece has to be very
inexpensive, but we think it's important to take what we have today and not throw
everything away.
Next CPU: The PowerPC was right there at the top. The Alpha was there too, but as
you know Intel has invested in Alpha and they've said they're going to support
Alpha, but there's a big question about what's going to happen to Alpha now that
Intel has their fingers in that.
Almost everyone agrees that we should support more than one CPU, and there's no
reason we can't do that. But there's a balance between when we need to release
something and we can't support ten CPUs. We do need to focus on a few, but I
think it does make sense to support more than one family because we'd like to see
products all the way from very low-end low-cost all the way to the high end, and
that means probably different CPUs.
Video and graphics: Re-targetable graphics, the majority thinks it very important
that we support different graphics formats, and I agree. 3D, genlocks, DVD are
things we've got to support.
Communications: yes, we've got to get a good TCP/IP stack and get a nice internet
interface and networking and the serial ports have to be up there.
PCI is I think very critical. There's pretty much a good standard and an awful lot of
boards out there that support it. I want to say that this is input back from the
developers, this doesn't garantee that we're going to do it, but this is what we're
going take as input for the important things to work on. We don't say when , or
how, but this is the feedback. Zorro slots are in there and OEM boards may or may
not have them but it makes sense to use an existing standard.
Memory protection comes up a lot, and we have to understand how that effects the
use of legacy applications.
We will compile that along with what we get here today and take that as one of
the large inputs to the research that we want to do for our plans and when we can
out some of those features in.
Marketing
not copied (track 9) !!!!!!!!!
Computers too complex and intimidating.
If something comes out that lets me do my simple tasks, that I can understand, and
it doesn't cost a lot of money, I'm gonna do it, and I think the Amiga has a lot to
say about that. We're positioned pretty well to have products that can do those
things.
Internet: basically the internet's about people having the freedom to express
themselves, being able to communicate and get information on the spot. There's a
lot of talk about push technology on the internet, but it's really pull, where users
can say I want the weather every morning or I want my stock quote, those things
are going to start showing up and those services are going to be available and
that's another huge thing that's going to drive this market.
Digital entertainment. Games are becoming more real, and the more real life they
become, the more people need these products, because they see it and they're like
"Wow I've gotta have that", and that will help drive this market.
Education: the education market is absolutely essential right now. Every student
needs a computer. That'll help drive the market as well.
Industry standards:
it's critical that we follow the industry stabdards. If we do our own thing it's OK,
but we also have to support the industry standards. MPEG2 video, USB, 1394...
Digital broadcasts, instead of being NTSC or PAL, moving more to digital, abd
when that happens, again, people that have a box on the other end, it's a digital
set like a receiver, it's got a processer in it, it's got memory, it's got some type of
operating system, so why can't I use it as a computer? That makes a lot of sense
for us to look at those kinds of things, and the Amiga's got a really good operating
system to do that because it's low-cost, efficient, and the video graphics are
amazing.
Video-conferencing. I don't know how fast that'll take off, but I think when things
become very simple and people can touch a screen, a lot of people would like to
do that.
Java, C++ !!!!!!!!!!!!! not copied
Products under preparation.
These are some of the projects, all the way from a consumer internet appliance to
an all-in-one TV, VCR, computer. Another idea is something for kids. I've seen some
new kids computers that have small LCDs.
Summary of research
System: we want to have releases out on at least a yearly basis, if not more.
Graphics: This is an area where the Amiga was way ahead of its time but the
industry has caught up and is starting to move past. But when we met with Newtek
they told us that when they actually do non-linear editing the Amiga is still today
better than things like Silicon Graphics.
Coimmunications: we need to make it easier with the architecture to support some
of these new standards so that we dont have tpo have all these external boxes and
different expansion busses and other expensive solutions to support some of these
things.
Amiga Development
To have the best technology you need the best people. W'eve got to recruit
worldwide, and that means that we're probably not going to have everyone in the
same location. We'd like to get as many people in the same place (when we figure
out where that is, if it's Sioux City, great, if it's not, somewhere). We need to hire
the right people. We will have contractors, but we will have a good team in the
headquarters.
We are developing a three-year roadmap. We don't want to hurry up and get the
next rev out and find out it's not a stepping-stone for the future. We want to make
sure that wherever it leads makes sense for the two years down the road, so we're
developing more like a three-and-a-half year map. That doesn't mean that
everything has to be set in stone, or we'd never start, because technology always
changes, but we want to feel very good about our choices before we jump right in.
Operating system upgdrades and releases: to be able to plan when it makes sense
for an upgrade and when it makes sense for a whole new generation to come out,
that really has some new architecture and some new features.
GUI: Because of all the different product categories they're going to need different
interfaces, so we need an architecture that supports all kinds of user interfaces.
System development kits: we need to know what you need in these kits. Part of the
kit needs to be a good compliance test because if there's ten thousand developers
and we've got all these software products and hardware products Amiga Inc's going
to be overloaded with testing all these things, so we need a compliance test that
you're going to test, and you'll send that in and say here, we've submitted it, it
works, and we'll audit that and make sure that we have a compatibility, because,
remember, we've got all these software pieces, we've got all these hardware pieces,
and we've gotta make sure that the Boing ball here works with the Boing ball
there.
System 3.5:
You're waiting for 3.5. This is a sort of a highlight, we haven't defined it
completely. We would like to utilise what's been done in a lot of cases. There's no
need to rewrite things if people like yourself have written new printer drivers and
different things for the internet.If you're interested in contributing, or you want us
to investigate something send us an email and we can get to work on those things.
There's an awful lot of work that's been done, for instance in the internet browser,
for example, there's four or five of those things out there and it's going to be very
difficult for us to choose which one we're going to put into the operating system.
Maybe we'll put pieces of two, I'm not sure, but I just want to apologise in
advance because we're not going to be able to put everything in there.
Things like better internet support, printer support, user interface, higher capacity
drives, bug fixes. If you have something that's been a problem for a long time we
want to hear that. Hopefully there'll be a lot more things in 3.5, these are just
some of the things I've got listed.
We are also trying to make sure that this release will be a software-only release.
Until we actually define it and get it rolling I don't want to commit to a certain
month. We're not going to sell vaporware. We're not going to be in the business of
announcing something and knowing in the backroom that there's not one bit of
code written for it and we haven't decided what we're going to do with it. We
want to announce things when we know we have it and are ready to release it.
There will basically be two categories of system development kits. If somebody wants to do a complete product we woud have a kit for that where we would define what the core architecture would be and say these things have to be in there and if the're not it's not going to be compatible with the software out there. But we don't want to confine it so much that you can't build the product you want. We will be doing hardware reference designs, in other words here's a prototype of a product that we think makes a lot of sense, here's the application, whatever it takes to come up with neat solutions. And a lot more tools for the operating system, that's one of the things that may slow down the upgrade releases is that we're going to have the right tools. Then another set of kits for the application content industry and basically it's similar to the overall OEM products.
Don't quit. We really think that's one of the strengths of our success, being able to listen to you. Remember you're our customer, you're the ones that are going to be the virtual team that's going to make this happen.
Petro: I'm quite sure that there's no questions.
Q on graphics standards:
Jeff: it's a priority and we'll see what we can do for the 3.5 release.
The major release after that will be able to support several graphics standards and
have the application choose which graphics it would like to use. We'll pack as much
as possible into 3.5 but it's gona be a stepping stone to the next generation and it
can't take eight months to add something.
Eric (Belgique): How much do you plan to spend on advertising in the
next six or 12 months? After the speech the impression I have is that 3.5 will be
3.1 plus Miami, TurboPrint, NewIcons and MUI, which is not very new, I'm sorry.
(clapping)
Jeff: Those few things are just the things that, of course we are going
to do. That's the shortlist. Of course we recognise that. There's a big list of things
we're looking at that we're hoping to include, but it's a question of how long it will
take to include a lot of the other things so that we can get a release out to you.
Eric: Sony pays for Playstation advertising. Are you going to do that.
Jeff: Petro has a budget and Amiga Inc has a budget, through the end
of the year 2000. And that's been approved. And that does include millions of
dollars for advertising.
Petro: Of course, we will not tell you how much we have got to spend,
but I think it's a huge amount we can spend, and we'll do it very well.
We sold in the last two months more than a thousand units in India.
Question: with a manpower of four or five, how are you going to
develop the Amiga?
Jeff: We have four people today, but we won't have four in a couple of
months. First of all we'll build an entire engineering staff, hardware and software
engineers... We're spending a lot of time making sure that we have the right
people in the top places because we want to build an organisation that's going to
last and be succesful.
We're going to develop the operating system but that doesn't mean we're going to
do it on our own. We'll be working with hardware vendors, people like Motorola,
some of the leading guys out there that I can't mention right now because of non-
disclosure agreements. We're not going to design everything. It's not like the
Commodore architecture where everything is done completely in-house. We call it
virtual engineering, where we specify it, we do a lot of the design ourselves, biut
somebody else is better at design, and that's the company that's leading that
market. We're going to partner up with those people..
Question Ben Vost: Darreck let slip a deal being struck with Epson and
then we couldn't find any confirmation about that. Can you tell us a bit more about
that?
Jeff: Yeah, Darreck let's a lot of stuff slip. (laughter). Basically, the
companies that we'eve talked to, as far as printer companies, people maybe like
Adobe who have different formats that we want to support, most of those
companies have been very open to supporting us. There's no official
announcements because we haven't done any real deals.
Q: Would you be ready to go out and get some of the big software
companies to port major applications to Amiga?
Jeff: We haven' made any decisions at this point to fund a certain
software company to port their software over. One of the things we can do is
leverage Gateway's relationship with a lot of companies. They're buying lots of
software from these companies and we can say, "Well you know, you really ought
to support the Amiga". (pause) (laughter).
There may be some key software that we may look into. I wouldn't say it's out of
the question.
Q: You can't tell us when the OS 3.5 will be finished, but can you tell
us when it will be started. (laughter)
Jeff: Soon. I've got a meeting with Ted Waitt when I get back to tell
him how the conference went, and say basically, OK we're moving here, and here's
what we're going to do. He's completely behind it, he just wants to hear. The
business plan has been approved, the money's been approved, it's just what's your
execution, what's your plan, that's what I have to put on the table when I get back.
It's a good opportunity that we have this conference before we lay that down. And
with that the hiring starts.
We will be working on the next generation in parallel with our work on the 3.5.
Jeff on Newtek: Dwight (CEO of NewTek) called us last week and said
he'd had enough of the Amiga people calling him. He said he needs to get moving
on that, so we're actually in discussions with NewTek again. (applause)
Q: is there a possibility of Newtek building a second-generation toaster
for world-wide distribution, not just in NTSC.
Jeff: I'm under NDA with them so I can't actually say their plans, but I
can comment the fact that their future plans match up a lot with our future
preliminary plans as far as where they're going with their architecture and what we
are going to do. But as far as them supporting it worldwide, you'd have to ask
them.
Jeff: We want you all to know we're a team. That means everyone in
this room!