NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/misc-part1/3222

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 3.7 KB

Path: mail2news.demon.co.uk!pfloyd.demon.co.uk
From: Keith Blakemore-Noble <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: AT UK redundancies
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 96 22:22:52 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <4dp0fu$[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <17717BDC5S86.U249026
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On or around Tue, 23 Jan 96, Branko Collin is alledged to have muttered
something along the lines of -

BC> In article <[e-mail]>
BC> [e-mail] (Jeroen T. Vermeulen) writes:

BC> You're right.
BC>
BC> Look at it from a different perspective. Would Escom have approached
BC> the buy-out in this way if they were only in it for the Commodore
BC> brand name? I don't think so. I they wanted that they would have sold all
BC> things Amiga as soon as they had acquired it. That's the way it goes in
BC> the real world. Instead, they set up offices in Bensheim, made new logos,
BC> started producing A1200s, Magic Packs and A4000s, and are still selling
BC> them. These are not the things you do when you're just in it for the
BC> name.

Wow.  A new logo. That must have cost them a fortune in R & D and investment ;-)

Started selling A1200s (but refusing point-blank to advertise them - definitly
a sign of someone who wants the machine to succeed...) and A4000s at bloody
stupid high prices.

Yup, it is obvious that Escom wanted the Amiga so badly, that is why they
are heavily promoting it and why they have priced it aggressivly.


However, they wanted the C= name badly, so it was worth buying the Amiga too
(when the alternative was to be unable to buy the C= name at all), and having
bought it, why not fleece the market a little to recoup some of the costs
without incurring much extra in the way of expenses.


If Escom are serious about the Amiga, then when can we expect to see
some advertising?  When can we expect to see a realistically priced
machine on the market?


I shall give you an example.  The MD at work used to believe that Amigas were
'just games machines' until I persuaded him to let me have one at work instead
of a PeeCee.  Now that he has seen just exactly what they can do, he is a
firm advocate for the Amiga, never missing an opportunity to extol their
virtues to visitors!  As a result, we use Amigas for all of our programming,
and are planning to buy one as our server.

Once Escom bought C= and announced that they were going to start selling
Amigas again, he was all in favour of us buying new Amigas instead of
PeeCees.  Then came the price.  For the price of an A1200 with a hard drive,
we could (and sadly did) buy a 486DX66, 8Mb RAM, CDROM drive and 540Mb hard
drive - purely because we could not justify the extra price to buy an
equivalent A1200 (the PeeCee came with a monitor included in the price,
the A1200 didn't).

As for forking out GBP2,200 for an A4000/040 tower - forget it.  In no way
could I ever convince the management to buy such a machine when we could buy
2 decent spec PeeCees with monitors for that price (much as I detest PeeCees,
it is impossible to argue against such prices).

Of course, I can now see that Escom are serious about the Amiga, which is why
they refuse to advertise and why they price them so stupidly high, especially
when compared to their own-brand (and C= brand) PeeCees.


I hope that I am wrong, but so far there is no evidence to the contrary :-((

--
If Intel sponsored a football team, they'd never make it to a decent division.