Amiga president responds to Iwin

Collas cautiously optimistic about Commodore wannabe's plans

Amiga, inc. president Jim Collas yesterday held out -- albeit cautiously -- an olive branch to European hardware player Iwin, the company behind plans to release AmigaOS 3.5-compatible computers and market them under the Commodore Business Machines brand. Collas' comments, posted on the comp.sys.amiga.misc Usenet newsgroup, followed earlier posts from president Mark Steinbach claiming that Amiga, inc. had "fooled" the Amiga community. Collas is clearly taking a very pragmatic approach to Iwin. "I should caution that I am a bit sceptical of their claims given nobody in the Amiga community has heard of them before. I won't make any conclusions until I talk to them," he wrote. That said, he is clearly interested in what Iwin is proposing: "If the products they describe on their Web site are real, I would be interested in talking to them. I have always felt that advancing the current Amiga platform while we launch a next generation Amiga would help the Amiga community. This is why we are doing O/S 3.5. Given the state of affairs when I took over six months ago, I didn't believe that advancing the current Amiga hardware was feasible. We haven't had the internal resources to develop both product lines and I didn't see any external solutions. If Iwin is real, it may be an interesting option for an O/S 3.5 platform that could also run our next generation Amiga OE." Since Amiga, inc.'s moves of late seem to have alienated the more conservative elements among the Amiga community -- they believe the company has lost sight of the machine's original raison d'etre -- Iwin could provide Amiga with an opportunity to regain those users' support without hindering the development of the next-generation Amiga platform the company is currently preparing. Certainly, Iwin seems open to co-operation. For all Steinbach's claims apparently anti-Amiga, inc. comments, he also claimed the company "would like to work closely together with Amiga, inc". Collas promised to open a dialog with Iwin next week, round about the time that Iwin will release specifications for its Amiga-compatible machines. ®