I really want to thank everyone that came here, especially Bob and Diana for putting this on. It's a wonderful event, and my first US show. As Petro mentioned, we went to the Cologne show in Germany, and that was a great experience. I also want to recognize Marilyn Flint and Darreck Lisle who are both Amiga Inc. employees, along with Joe Torre, all Amiga Inc. employees. And Petro coming all the way from Germany and always staying with the Amiga. One other person that I want to say something about, and I'll get in trouble for doing this, but I wouldn't be the man who I am unless she was with me, and that's my wife Kim.

I had a presentation that I was putting together for this, and then I had a speech that I wrote for this. Then after spending the weekend with you guys, I decided I didn't want to do either one of them. Ok, I really want to speak from my heart, here--to be very honest with you and open. As much as I can share with you, I will. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of questions afterwards.

I'll give you a little bit about my background. I'm very honored to be asked by Ted Waitt to be here tonight in this spot. When I came to Gateway, I was in charge of the portable division at a competitor, and Ted asked me four years ago, "Well, you know, we could really use a lot of help on our portables."

I said, "No, I'm tired of doing portables."

And he said, "so what do you want to do?"

And I said, "I just want to look into the future."

He said, "Okay," he's a cool guy, "do what you want."

So, I spent some months in research and came up with the concept of (you might be familiar with it), the Destination, it's the PC-TV. It's an interesting product. It was more of an attempt to get that market started, knowing that convergence market is coming. And it's interesting to see that all the top competitors are now working on products very similar to that. So, we'll see where that goes.

But, I really believe because of the vision that Ted saw in me to come up with that so early in the market when Gateway wasn't recognized as an innovative company in the way of new types of technology, when he saw the Amiga opportunity, I think that was a good reason. In fact, one day, I was getting a little tired of the Destination. I thought that it was launched and was happening. I sort of wanted to go on to that next thing. I was just telling one of my colleagues that night that I was sort of tired, and I really wanted to move onto the next thing. I was walking down the hall very late at night at work, and I ran into Ted Waitt, and Ted said, "Come on over here, Jeff."

I just thought that he wanted to shoot the bull. We were talking, and he said, "Well, I want you to think of one thing".

And I thought, "He's just pulling my leg, here", because I'm always thinking of all kinds of things.

"No, I want you to think of one thing."

Rick Snyder, who was the president back then, he came out and he was sort of smiling at me, and I thought these guys were just pulling my leg.

So, I started walking away, and they said, "Oh no, come on back here, come on back here."

He looked at me and he said, "I want you to think of Amiga." That was just after Gateway had acquired it.

I said, "Seriously, really?"

He said, "Yeah. I want you to think about it, look into it a little bit, and write me an email and tell me what you think about Amiga."

I don't know, some of you might know my background. Actually, when I was in college, I worked for a company, and through the years I actually worked for their headquarters. My job was back when the Commodore, Atari, TI, Activision, and all those companies were out. It was a big retail chain, and they asked me to actually go to stores, train them and teach them about how to merchandise. So my salary was actually being paid by Commodore back then. It was funny because (I'm ashamed to tell you) in our house, we had Ataris and we had Commodores, and, well, we had them all. My conclusion was that the VIC 20 was the best thing.

I brought my VIC 20 home, and I spent I think about four hours writing my first microprogram, and I ran out of memory. I had to run back to the store, go to the back and grab one of this big modules with, like, what? 2 meg of RAM, or [corrected by the audience] like 5 K, or, I don't know what it was. It was this huge thing, and just about four hours of programming and I ran out. I don't know if that means that I'm a bad programmer, but I always said when I went back and finished up college that the Commodore was the best out of those machines, I always loved it. So, I went on to the 64 and did different things wit it. So, that was sort of my background.

One thing that I've realized since I've taken this job, more than anything, is that Amiga is not only this awesome technology that was really ahead of its time, but it is more than a technology, it's the people. It's the values, it's the dedication, it's in your heart. I want to say that we're going through a lot of tough times, and it's very difficult for me to hear the emails and listen to the phone calls, and find out about the companies that are going down with Amiga. It hurts. It hurts so bad, sometimes I tell my wife, "I don't even know if I want to do this any longer. I don't want to let these people down."

But the fact is, nothing good comes very quickly. We have to have patience. That's something I struggle with very much.

I go into Gateway's management and I say, "I want to do this."

They say, "Do you think that's the best plan?"

"Well, maybe not"

"Go back to the drawing board, let's hear another one."

Actually, since I've started, I've come up with at least twelve different business plans for the future of Amiga. These plans aren't "what are we going to do six months from now?" These plans are "what are we going to do through the year 2001, 2002?"

It's very frustrating because I want to get everything going, and yes, we are working on an operating system upgrade. We've got a lot of things we can do in the interim but, until that future plan is solid, which I'm reallyexcited about right now, actually. That's one of the good things that's happened is, because I've gone back to the drawing board so many times, that now I've got a plan that has exceeded my expectations. I'm really excited about it. One of the things, to address what Mitch was saying tonight, that big competitor we know about out there may own the standards today, but they don't own the future.

I really believe what's coming is what I call the "digitally connected global society". What that means is, basically, because of the acceptance of the Internet, because of the need for people in the future to be connected, it's going to be part of your daily life. I mean, it already is for you, but I'm talking about people who never wanted computers in their life. It's going to be part of education, it's going to be part of their daily chores. So, that's one of the big things that's going to drive us. The other thing is the digital revolution. Everything is going digital, digital media. Basically those two things, I believe, the need to be connected and the need to understand the digital stuff.

And the entertainment value. The realism that digital brings,(and you guys have shown it more than anybody) the ability to take your imagination and digitally project it. I'm amazed when I see what NewTek's done. When you see a movie and they say, "Well, you know that whole scene had nothing to do with video that was shot. In fact, ther was no video in it at all. It was all digital graphics producing that." Just imagine what that's going to become in the future. I think those two things are going to drive a brand new market, and, guess what? The other guys don't own it yet.

I believe that they are trying to own it, but there's three fears, three basic fears that's stopping. Well, let's say in the US. They say that 40% of the households in the US have a PC, well, 60% don't. Why? I believe there's three basic fears, and this goes for the rest of the world as well.

The first fear is "how much time is it going to take for me to figure out how to use this stupid thing, and then after I use it, is it really going to give me what I want?" They're scared to buy a product that's got all of these things on the screen and, it's like, "I don't see anything in here that says how I can send an email," or things like that. I believe that there's a big fear there, that if we can accomplish that and make that easy, then that's one thing that we'll be able to break into the market with.

The other thing is the dollar investment. "How much money do I really want to invest to buy a PC when I can use a notepad, buy this new thing when I can just watch my TV, to get this new box when I can just use my telephone? I can read a magazine," and those things. I believe that when the prices continue to drop, and we're seeing the PC market drop. But, because of this operating system that uses so many resources, how do they ever get to the point they're going to get to? It's going to be a real chore for them. I believe that Amiga's operating system has the efficiency to get to those products.

The other fear that people have is obsolescence. They're all scared "if I buy this today, next week some new thing is going to come out that I'm not going to be able to do the same thing I just bought this for yesterday." Or, the value of this is going to drop so much because there is a new CPU coming out or whatever. In my new plan, I believe we can actually overcome that. That's one thing that I really can't talk about, but there's a way to actually do that, and it's not going to be based on the typical architectures here today, but, it can be done.

We do need to talk about standards. Because this market is being seen by all these companies. You basically have every PC company, every consumer electronic company, telephones, cable companies, broadcast companies. You name it. They're all in this huge acquisition and partnering flurry because they don't know who the leader is going to be. Basically, one of the questions that keeps coming up is, do they want a standard for this new industry? Well, I believe they do want standards, but they don't want any one company to control them. I think that's one of the great things that we can do. We can look at our competition and say, "what are they doing wrong and what can we do right?"

That's one of the reasons why I'm not going to stand up here and make promises about vaporware that we're going to come out with in two years. When we tell you what we're going to do, I really want to be honest and say it is coming, it's true, this is what's going to happen. The hard part about that is that it's going to take time to develop this. It's going to take time to launch this. What I'm telling you now is we're going down into the valley, and we're going to keep going into the valley before we actually come back out of it. So,what I'd also like to tell you is if you have to do other things, whatever you have to do to survive, never leave that piece in your heart that says Amiga, OK?

Everyone wants to know about our upgrade, probably.

We do have a small staff, we do have several people that we have under contract. You've probably heard an awful lot of rumors about us working with other companies to actually come up with the upgrade. That is true. We are working with several companies to actually take what's been produced out there, take the best pieces of that, try to integrate that, also add some new value and come out with the release. Petro talked about the third quarter this year. We still don't know exactly when we're going to come out with that. But, as we get closer, we will make announcements. I can tell you in general what the areas are that we're putting the highest priority on right now.

We're working the hardest on having full internet solutions.

We'd like to make some enhancements to the user interface.

We want to support more industry standards, as many as we can in this release.

The other thing that's very important, because we're a licensing and technology company, we're not planning in the near future on coming out with a new box. We're looking for OEMs to do those hardware and those pieces that we'll be licensing the technology to. One of the things we really need to hear is from all you people through the users groups and through the ICOA, the Developers Group, what you're developing, what you'd like see. We want to support those things in the operating system.

The other thing we're going to do is have better documentation, especially for the developers. It's important that we oversee all of the new changes, but we want the Amiga communities to build and build and build. If someone wants to come up with a device that's a robot built on Amiga technology, then I'd say go for it.

So, basically, we're working on those things, and there are still more. I do want to say that I don't want to just concentrate on what we call OS 3.5. I want to concentrate on what we call expanding the operating system. So it'll go to new levels. Because 3.5 is just going to be a start and there will be more.

[At this point, we lost one or two sentences, as we turned our tape over].

I said it to my employees this week. I sat them down and I said, "You guys, have I been ignoring you a lot?"

And they said "Yes."

I said, "That's on purpose."

They asked "Why?"

I said, "Because we need to figure out what the future is. And that doesn't mean we don't keep working on the current stuff and bringing it forward, because that's what we need to do as well. But if we can cement our future, we can come back stronger than we ever have. That's what I've been working on."

So, I want to tell you the same thing. I apologize right now that I've been ignoring you. That is true, because I'm trying to work the future and get it approved and bring us into the future. The future's going to be a little time off, but if we get there, it'll be one major party.