Dr. Peter Kittel's announcement of his hiring by Escom

 This is a message of intent from Dr. Peter Kittel, Escom's new head of
 Engineering for the Amiga .

 
 Mr. Schmitt, Boss of Escom, has authorized me to publish the state of
 affairs.

 Most important item first: I have my job, and it's the of the world-wide
 boss of engineering. Yes, I know, I start into a very difficult task, as
 successor of real celebrities. OTOH I had eleven years time at Commodore
 to study what is the wrong strategy and which leads to success. I will
 spend all effort to avoid these known errors.

 And now for the big picture: There will be founded a new, completely
 selfstanding daughter company of Escom AG. It will have own rooms at an
 own address in Heppenheim. It will be the headquarter of the new company,
 with control and coordination for the whole world. One subsidiary will
 exist in any case in the Netherlands, and it will do Europe-wide
 distribution and sales. Further country subsidiaries are not impossible.
 Yet there are no concrete decisions about UK, USA, and Canada in
 particular.

 The new company is yet to be founded, but this is currently in the works
 with great effort. The name is not yet decided, it will probably be
 something like "Commodore-Amiga" or "Amiga-Commodore" or the like. This
 company will (at least for the time coming) care exclusively for the Amiga
 model palette.

 As can be inferred from the first paragraph, there will be an engineering
 department, for hardware and OS software. For this there exist already
 promising contacts with well-known and well-reputated names. Yet there's
 no problem if someone feels obliged to send his resume (no email or fax,
 please) to

 Escom AG
 Personalabteilung
 Tiergartenstr. 9
 D-64646 Heppenheim
 Germany
 
 You see, we consider ourselves an international company. Of course we only
 want the best ones :-).

 Further there will be a Support department which will do world-wide
 coordination, but also covers the german area. Thus most of these people
 should be german-speaking. The Amiga Developer Support Programm ADSP will
 get reactivated ASAP. About those developers currently using BIX or CIX,
 we have not yet decided. These people should feel free to contact me
 directly at this private account (no company one *yet* existing) and
 giving some input. In the past years there was a split among the developer
 community into different communication channels. Thus no direct
 communication of the developers among each other was possible, and for
 engineering this meant double work to explain the same issues once on one
 net and then additionally on another net. We will do everything to avoid
 this nonsense in future. There are big obstacles, as there are big cost
 differences in different regions of the earth, and simultaneously a 
 high degree of confidentiality has to be maintained. - Enduser support
 will happen mostly in electronic form, via mailbox, Internet, and probably
 also Btx.

 Of course there will be also a Marketing department and what is needed in
 admin. All together this will be a rather slim company of ca. 50 people at
 first, but a further expansion is of course not impossible.

 It is planned to restart production of the last current model palette,
 probably in full scale, but no guarantee yet for this. Also of course not
 all models will appear at the same time again, one after the other. As
 Escom has an own poweful casing production, they will perhaps get a
 redesign of their styling, in any case for the A4000, but the hardware
 under the hood remains unchanged at first. First diverse contributing
 factories on earth have to revive their production of parts. New
 developments would mean additional months of waiting, before you could buy
 the products. That would be too big a sacrifice.

 The direction of the new engineering department will definitely be the
 port to some RISC platform. The choice of this RISC is still open. There
 are ecstatic advocats for at least two alternatives, PPC and HP PA RISC.
 Chris Ludwig gave an interesting interview about this. It will be the
 first task of engineering to prepare this choice of paths into the
 future with all possible expertise.

 It has been decided to be very liberal in regards of licensing in the
 future. So, whoever wants to build e.g. an Amiga Laptop or a set-top box,
 can get chips and OS!

 As you all see, much of this is still a letter of intent. The points which
 are declared as still open are *really* open, so there's no use in
 bombarding me with further questions.

 As my work load, at least now in the building phase, will be immense, I
 can't guarantee my presence on the net like before. But who knows me,
 knows that that would be most painful for me myself. So let's look
 forward.

 In the next weeks there will be press conferences to tell more and more
 details.

 Long live the Amiga and for a good cooperation.