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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: CU_AMiGA on October 17, 2003, 03:42:45 PM
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So, what was it that sadly killed off the Amiga? Personally i think it was largely to do with piracy, but also a mix of Commodore's poor management and the way they produced machine's that haven't been updated? What does anyone else think?!
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commodore
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Leaking batteries (well, mine anyway...) :-o
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cbm and ms :-)
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Well, the Amiga isn't dead yet :-)
I've recently looked at some old computer ads from 1994-1996 and ultimately I think it was Commodores bankruptcy combined with lower PC prices and higher Amiga prices.
All of a sudden the kids could use daddy's PC to play games on (for example Doom, which I also think has a part in the "death" of the Amiga) so there was no need to buy a special "game computer" anymore. That, combined with the fact that you could get a very fast PC for less money than an A1200 with a hard drive, a decent monitor and some extra RAM.
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Well okay, not dead, but the position it became in the late 90's and now.
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Amiga users(?) storing their amigas up in the atic and replacing them with PCs!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(posted from an A2000HD in use since 1990)
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Well okay, not dead, but the position it became in the late 90's and now.
I'm just pulling your leg :)
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What killed off the Amiga, in the end, was the lack of professional office software. For the managment of Commodore to get their work done, they needed to run IBM PC's. As a result, they grew less and less aware of what made the Amiga a powerful and useful tool. As a result, their marketing began faltering, as how do you market something you do not know? Their sales force was then pushed into the same situation, again due to the lack of professional-grade office software.
Do you honestly think that Gould was playing with the Video Toaster? Or Ali playing with DPaint? Hell no, they're writing up memos, looking at spreadsheets, checking up on the corporate database, all on PC's.
So you want someone to blame for the Amiga's fall, blame the coders that failed to realize how critical this segment of the marketplace *IS*. That failed to grasp that without Commodore's management onboard, the product would continue to languish. Failed to realize how the fate of their platform rested on the necessity of a single, solitary, piece of software, a professional office suite.
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What killed the Amiga?
AGA I would say :nervous:
To late,too little ......
The A1000/500/2000 really were ahead of the PCs in the late 80s, but
the A1200/4000 could just say "me too" (and often not even that).
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what killed it? simply commodore dying helped it alot , though its not dead yet but you all know what i mean.
anyway people belived (majority) that amiga's didnt have soundcards , so musicians left.
people didnt see why they should upgrade , so they left and bought a pc (weird eh?)
people wanted 3d games , and amiga was pretty fast saying it was impossible , though if u look at other consoles that was living after commodore died...well its very ironical.
anyway publishers and developers noticed the non stabiity in commodore so they escaped before it would hurt them , sierra,lucas,dma (though they returned a whie later to do lemmings 3) , and most of all , pc outsold amiga games and such in the end, yes its another puzzle but it has alot to do with pcdrom and beeing before the burner times.
now (even with the huge pc market , pc have more problems keeping it stable than commodore had back in lets say 90-92)
and as a last thing , amiga was the bedroom coders dream , but from 93 and up developers and game companies etc hunted everyone down and put them in a job, and as every greedy person, amiga wasnt up for it at that time or later for that matter so they moved to consoles/pc.
but as a good thing, people are returning now ..
people thinks of amiga as part of their life and thats good, i know of a lot of pc people who never felt such a way for their pc.. :D
anyway the bigest problem for amiga users in the past was, people didnt upgrade .. publishers didnt belive in developing for lets say 2mbchip + 2mb fast (which would make the mast twice as fast ) , unlike on pc where games and progs force you to upgrade...amiga did it the otherway around.
and lets face it, we use 12 year old machines (most of us) and try dooing that with a pc (which back then costed 4 times as much compared to an a1200).
too powerfull and developers not wanting to make gamers/users to expand/upgrade their hw killed the amiga , or the userbase anyway.
cheers
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bad management by various companys.
the change from 68k to ppc max processor 060 -software.
arguments about the kernal.
no OS upgrades for a long time.
lack of support by 3rd party software drivers e.t.c.
and if the mediator pci bus board had arrived earlier i would have bought one myself and towerd it up with all the bells & whistles.
anybody think of anything else :-D
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Agreed. What gets me is that Amiga was in a good position about 1990 when the Amiga 3000 came out and was nicely set up for the next kick ass Amiga. All what we got was the A4000, which was a considerably rushed version of the A3000+ and the A1200, although the A1200 sold well. Even just after the bankrupcy of Commodore, the Amiga was still doing okay. I do remember some guy warning back in 1995, that Amiga would soon die of piracy, the guy being the author of Virtual Karting on the Amiga, forgot his name. Whats happened to him now anyway, he left cos hackers hacked hacked into Virtual Karting 2. Poor guy.
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think it was largely to do with piracy
Piracy is not to blame at all imo and it is a well used excuse when a mickey mouse company is failing badly to give the people what they want and have to bang the "pirate" drums.
You just have to take a look at the current Amiga company to see stupidity in action.
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Commodore was to blame they continued to sell the amiga and never done any real updates, look at the sound chip the same one from 1985 upto 1993 and the 68000 cpu had reached it end as far as speed was concerned, As time went by graphics had moved on and 3d was now available for the pc and doom was so good that a lot of people could now see the pc as a viable alternative to the amiga. :-)
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In my view, it seemed that commodore was hell bent on self destructing.
They did not market or adrvetise the Amiga, that was left to retailers.
They sunk huge amounts of money into thier PC clone section effectively competing with themselves and thowing that cash in a deep hole as that section was losing money hand over fist
they badly mismanaged thier finances.
I can only wonder what would have hapened if they had not put all that cash into x86 systems, and divided into marketing, development, and getting some decent financial advisors.
I shudder to think what the a600/a1200/a4000 would have been like with only a 1/3 of that cash squandered on pc clones was put into amiga development
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The main bit I see was commodore resting on it's butt. Approaching the Amiga market like the C64. They could release a C64 in the early 80s and leave it unchanged for years.
The A1000 started out doing almost everything better than anything else.
The A2000/A500 didn't improve much, but the industry had moved closer.
The A3000 was a big step ahead, but everyone else had moved ten big steps ahead. A3000s were just "A very good machine" instead of completely eclipsing everything available
By the time the A1200/A4000 came out, as standard machines and with the expansion available at the time, there were some parts to the Amiga that were painfully behind, with a few exceptional abilities - cue the beginning of really wedging into the niche market
Those of us who stayed with Amigas for years afterwards (Until mid 2000 for me and my A1200) found that our machines filled our needs just fine, and as a fiercely loyal community the hardware from 3rd party suppliers kept coming out that enabled the older machines to keep up to date with a little work and a little hunting around.
dana
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The fact that when the Amiga came out it could do almost anything for everyone (games, graphics, sound etc). By 1994 the Amiga was no longer in this position and was overtaken by cheap PCs which could have all manner of peripherals attached for low prices
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@ amigamad
I still think Paula is miles ahead of almost any PC soundcard from before 1995.
@ all
I think bad management at Commodore was the primary cause, with piracy dealing the final blow in the post-C= years.
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Commodore all the way.
While this may be another debate, piracy help shift alot of Amiga's, sad but true.
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I would have to say that ultimately games are what killed off the amiga.
Ironic isn't it? (warning*** some brutal honesty below...)
Multimedia and particularly games are what gave the Amiga its foothold...thousands upon thousands of C64/Atari and Apple gamers saw what the Amiga could do and wanted..nay drooled for an Amiga (circa 1986-1990).
While video editing provided an alternative market for the Amiga, games were (imo) the primary driver of Amiga sales during this period. Businesses in general did not adopt Amigas because of the already mentioned lack of business titles and tended to go with IBMs and clones, schools generally went with Apples (at least in North America).
Then around the end of 1990 three things happened that made gamers begin to doubt their Amiga as a games machine.
- VGA Card becoming an adopted standard
- Ad Lib card
- 386DX
Now of course the Amiga's sound was still far superior to the Ad lib card...but its market share wasn't. Now all those serious IBM business users had kids or they themselves could just run out and purchase a relatively cheap graphics and sound upgrade for their machine. Within just a year the market share for IBM and clone game machines swung in their favour.
I am sad to admit it...but you guys on this board who stayed with the Amiga were the true diehards (some of you gamers but most not)...loyal and true...
It was the gaming mutineers like myself that got greedy after seeing...
- Wing Commander
- Ultima 6
- Wolfenstein 3D
I know that all of my Amiga friends at the time were converted just based on one of these three games (and yes this was before Doom...).
So while many of you true loyalists stayed...us mutineers left...in droves...with much shame I admit we abandoned ship.
Now game publishers saw this emerging and growing (remember this game market share grew almost overnight for IBM and clones) market and began to abandon the Amiga themselves...
First Origin Systems abandoned the Amiga (although many would argue they did with Ultima V). Ultima VI was programmed from the ground up for IBM and clones as was Wing Commander. ID Software members developed on clones.
What Amiga gamers were left were treated to abysmal ports...has anyone tried playing Ultima VI /Wing Commander or Kings Quest 5 on an Amiga 68000?
Terrible...and utterly disgraceful...they straight ported most of it, failing to take advantage of the Amiga's strengths.
Kings Quest could have been done in Extra Half bright mode as most of it is static (64 colours as opposed to 32)
Wing Commander used bitmaps and could have been much better had it used the blitter as opposed to CPU intense drawing like the IBM version (which has not native bitmap or sprite support in 320x200x256 mode).
So games which first made the Amiga, eventually killed it. Again hats off to you diehards and true loyalists...you did what I couldn't. You used your Amigas for so much more than just games..or you simply believed that things would get better...
Most of us didn't...and it is hard to sail a ship with 2/3 of your crew leaving...
sniff...
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@Calen
Agreed. I doubt piracy had anything to do with it... How much piracy is going around on the PC now? Lets not even start to talk about PSX or PS2, yet those machines are very successful. But yes, this is one of those often overdebated topics...
My 2 cents, Amigas were too expensive and underpowered when the 4000 came out. Plus many people didnt even know they existed :-) Once retailers like EB and Babbages started pulling the software off the shelves here in the US, the Amiga instantly became a dead machine.
I was working at EB once (94) and I was talking to a PC guy about amigas. Dude actually said 'But they cant even multitask!' If you don't know at least THAT much about amigas, then that says a lot about how much marketing was going on.
-Thorrin
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@calen
"While this may be another debate, piracy help shift alot of Amiga's, sad but true."
That actually ties in perfectly with this debate I think.
While I agree that many people went out and bought Amigas because of the fact that their best mate/cousin/uncle or whoever would let them copy all their software, it was still one of the things that helped kill the Amiga.
While it was great at the start, with Commodore's tills ringing all year round, ultimately developers just got fed up and left. And can you blame them? Net result - diminishing software support = fewer machines purchased = financial woes for Commodore.
Finally, I wouldn't totally agree that it was Commodore's fault all the way. They did do some things right - surviving in the face of all that competition from the clone makers was just never going to be easy...
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As in my above argument I think the formula might have looked more like this...
VGA+Adlib+386DX+Millions of upgradeable clones = Attraction for publishers
Attraction for publishers+Sloppy ports+abandoning gamers = diminishing amiga market share
Really don't think piracy was to blame...it was the games themselves and a market share that was created almost overnight by IBM/clones.
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I'd say mainly Commodore and it started before 1990. It was Greed, Mismanagement, and Marketing. The Colt PCs were a dumb idea and a waste of resources. While at the same time MS was aggressively exspanding and Apple was basically giving away Macs to schools and colleges.
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Here's what it WASN'T:
1. Advertising. I have a drawer full of old Amiga ads in Time, Newsweek, National Geographic... No, they didn't do much T.V., and maybe their "Computer For The Creative Mind" campaign wasn't as effective as it could have been (I liked it. Bought my first Amiga because of it), but the advertising was there.
2. Software. Wanna see my 1990's catalogues of Amiga software from all of the old, defunct Amiga retailers? LOTS of games, many of which sold Amigas to PC owners, Digita and Final Writer both had office suites which were competative at the time. Great stuff at reasonable prices.
3. The 1200 and CD32. Both machines sold out the roof, but debts had already done Amiga in by the time the CD32 hit stores. Interestingly, the amount of software produced for the CD32 surprized a lot of people in the computer and console game world. They thought that developers had long ago lost interest in the Amiga. Wonder if that's still true?
Here's the story, short and sweet: The worst case of corporate incompetence in history. Even before Ali, Commodore had a revolving door of managers who basically undid the work of their predisessors to start their own, soon to be aborted ideas. And Ali could have been the model for the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert.
That's it. PC clones? Non-issue. Microsoft survived the IBM PCjr., and Commodores error here was a calculated risk. They lost, but they could have bounced back from it. Piracy? Yeah, big hurt. But the end was management, that's really the whole story.
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Imo too many of us left and bought IBM/Clones for them to not be considered a factor...
They just didn't keep up with technology and had too much invested in proprietary technology. Almost every clone machine was upgradeable and come 1990 for very cheap. The only way most Amiga500 users (the majority of owners) could upgrade their machine was to buy a new one which wasn't always compatible...you could get accelerators but they didn't change graphics and cost an arm and a leg back then.
What was easy (on the wallet at least) was selling your A500 (the shame of it all) and having half the money needed for a 386dx 40 with 105mb hard drive, vga card, sound blaster etc.
Had I been able to upgrade my amiga 500 as cheaply and had the quality games been there I would have stayed and so would millions of others.
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The Amiga is Dead????
Damn. The news from outside the Village just doesn't circulate very fast in here.
I guess Amiga isn't #1.
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Unloyal users and companys also had a bad influence.
After the death of C= the companys and users should all stand their man and the rest of C= would have been quickly bought by an prospective company who would have continued developement.
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Bad management? most likely
Piracy? I doubt it. However, there is one thing that no one has mentioned: proprietary hardware. Look, if you could have a machine that did everything the Amiga did and used open market components, then I think the Amiga would be hot right now! That was the hope of the AmigaOne. You can't have cheap hardware unless there is a lot of competition, which means anyone and their brother can make it. That's why pc's are dirt cheap today. What do you think would happen if everyone on this site could build a computer to run Amiga OS without having to pay AI for the privilage to make it and using off the shelf parts? M$ makes their money selling an OS and they don't care whose computer you put it one. It's the manufacturer's job to make the OS work on their computer. I thought this is what AI was going to do. I was fooled again. :-?
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In the early 90's I ran my own business. My main market was the Amiga and its peripherals, however I still sold and dealt with pc products.
The first day of registering my business and opening up to the public, I had full pc dealership. Everything from motherboards, ram, hds, monitors, etc.
Commodore on the other hand, refused to give me support due to the fact that I was a 'small' store and not a major chain. Therefore I couldn't buy and stock 1200's and 4000's.
Next problem, to get dealership with a distributor for Amiga peripherals such as products from GVP, I had to argue my case with the distributor that I was a serious dealer, as they didn't like giving their products to the little stores.
Once again because I wasn't from a huge department store they wanted up front $$$ in orders etc. It took me 3 months of negotiation to have the opportunity to stock any Amiga products.
Meanwhile I have numerous PC companies throwing their full product support at me, and here I was trying to promote the Amiga, without any support from the idiots who were holding the future of it in their hands.
The big department stores at the time that sold the Amiga, had no idea what it was or how to use it. I witnessed numerous times, people going into these stores asking about the Amiga and the salesman would steer the customer away towards a pc. No wonder they never sold much.
Now this is what I would like you all to consider. If Commodore and the other Amiga distributors had got off their all mightly god-like podium and actually given their full product support to those of us who ran smaller stores and had die hard Amiga staff working for us, maybe we could have actually got out their and put a few more 1000 Amigas in peoples homes.
Once again, it is a rude awakening to just how f#$$ed the people behind it all were at the time. No wonder the pc holds the market, from the early 90's the pc companies were doing the right thing - THEY WERE GETTING THEIR PRODUCT OUT EVERY WAY POSSIBLE!
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What killed the Amiga? Poor management and marketing. It was dreadful. Everything was rushed. The CD32 was a good machine but was put in a ####ty box - very cheap, very tacky - and was seen as Commodore trying to cash in on video game market by cheaply converting an existing product (critics were forever failing to realise that the CD32 was a very capable machine at the time). However, this was partly due to poor software support (maybe as a result of the Amiga's perceived piracy problem). Also, having established the links between CD32's and A1200s, serious users became wary of a game machine, failing to realise its power. Thus, the few business users who had remained faithful to the Amiga, became disillusioned and quickly joined their friends on the PC bandwagon lest they got left behind. What I have just said is probably all crap. Suffice it to say, Commodore management was always sufficiently crap to ensure that no money was ever available to finance projects that would have resulted in guaranteed investment from loyal Amiga users throughout the world. I believe that the best example of crap Amiga/Commodore management was the A1200 CDROM debacle. Who didin't think that the CD32 would lead to a CD drive for the A1200 within months? We all know how long it took and frankly it was crap when it did. (Good old Archos managed to produce one for the PCMCIA slot despite this being impossible according to Commodore). Sorry for rant but all very annoying.
Computers for Dummies Dictionary for Computers; definition for Amiga: "the most technologically advanced, inexpensive home computer available - naturally , it flopped"
That about sums it up. Unfortunately.
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It was basically poor management. I think they treated Commodore as more of a tax write off than a real company. Had they pumped money into advertising and R&D, it would have still been on top.
One thing that always bugged me about Commodore and Apple is that they would waste money on new case designs. Had Commodore designed a standard Amiga case and kept it basically the same from model to model, the money saved could have been sunk into R&D for the chipset designs, motherboard and software.
I also think they should have transitioned themselves from a computer manufacturer to a software company that also set standard reference designs which they license out to motherboard manufacturers.
Andrea
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Surely the parent company, Commodore, going bust was the killer?
Admittedly the Amiga would have fared a lot better had Commodore marketed it better, but any platform is pretty much doomed when the company goes bust.
Of course there is the question as to what killed off Commodore, but I'm not sure that it's clear that it was because of Amiga related things. The Amiga may have started to fall behind in 1993, but I've heard arguments pointing out that the Amiga was still selling well back then, and it was more due to problems with their PC product lines.
If piracy had any effect, it was that PC/Mac had CD-ROM (which at the time was pretty much unpiratable), where as the Amiga was still on floppies. But as others have pointed out, piracy can actually help sales of hardware, and there's been plenty of piracy on other successful platforms in more recent times.
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It was definately Commodore. The Amiga was a 32 bit machine almost a decade before the competition. If Commodore had decent management, there wouldn't be windows. After all these years, I am so happy to be freed from Commodore. Now if we could just get rid of Amiga Inc. and put Alan Redhouse in charge or Ben Herman..maybe then something might happen.. :) Just my opinion. And I agree with an earlier reply, paula is amazing being so old. Some of my friends that have PCs can't believe the sound quality is that good made with a chip from 1985. I might add, that alot of my PC friends are impressed with the AmigaOS (And the computer still works after 10 years!). They really love the, just turn it off, and turn it back on thing. Now that the AmigaOne is here, they are thinking about switching, but they need to see OS4.0 on it. They are not really worried about the clock speed, because they see what AmigaOS can do on a 50mhz Cpu. They are intrested to see the response time on a newer CPU.
Yogi27
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CU_AMiGA wrote:
So, what was it that sadly killed off the Amiga? Personally i think it was largely to do with piracy, but also a mix of Commodore's poor management and the way they produced machine's that haven't been updated? What does anyone else think?!
Had nothing to do with Piracy. Piracy did no harm to the Amiga, just to it's software developers. Amiga died long before the software developers abandoned the scene.
Amiga continued to sell, even as Commodore died. The Amiga wasn't the problem, the problem was the Amiga was tied to a symbiotic host, that died, dragging the Amiga with it.
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Thats is completely. C= went bust, this caused the demise of Amiga.They lost huge amount of money in thier PC sector, this caused C= to go bust. They lost huge amounts of money in the PC sector because of poor management.They should never, in my opinion, even entered the PC market and focussed on Amiga's completely.
The CD32 was extremely popular, that fact of the matter is they were already too far gone fo the CD32 to pull them out of the hole. It would have if they could have produced enough.
All the Amiga sectors were running at a good to great profit...until of course Commodore went under.
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Yup. management and marketing. Management never really understood the Amiga, they bought it out from under Jack Tramiel and Atari, who were || this close to buying Amiga from the start-up company that Jay Miner helped start. Maybe Tramiel would have run it into the ground , too, but Management never understood the jewel that they had in their own engineering department and in Commodore MOS their chip making facility. Apple used MOS chips in their Apple IIs Jack had a better understanding of marketing than Gould and Ali, but he was always more concerned about making it cheaper rather than better. I've heard it said that if Commodore was to market sushi that they would advertise it as Cold, Dead, Raw Fish.
I bought a 2000 just after they came out and I quickly bought a second disk drive for it as swapping floppies was a pain. After a couple of years one of my kids stuffed paper in one of the drives, bending the heads and rendering it unrepairable at an affordable price. But I thought well, high density drives were out for PCs so surely Commodore will bring them out for Amigas as well and then I'll buy one of those and install it instead. Never happened. Oh sure eventually they were available for 3000s and 4000s, but they could have sold a sheepfull of them to existing owners. Processor upgrades for existing models could have been produced and sold like hotcakes if the price s were reasonable enough. Could an AGA card been possible for the 2000 or 500s? Maybe models like the 600 (should have had an 030 processor in it) should have been more expandable. They never seemed to value the customers that would have been the easiest sell. People who already had an Amiga.
They could have sold optical mice, joysticks, all kinds of upgrades, but the jewel was the Amiga OS and they could have sold that... to clone Amiga manufacturers. When memory cost a fortune, Amigas didn't need much. I only had one meg of memory for years and it wasn't until I installed a hard drive that suddenly I had apps that wouldn't run because of insufficient memory. Just having the drive there soaked up a critical amount of memory. My hard drive card had room for 8 more megs of memory though, and it was if I had died and gone to heaven with all that extra memory.
Commodore liked to use oddball proprietary standards like the 23 pin connectors that you could never buy anywhere else. Or GVP and its non standard simms.
Commodore spent a fortune setting up a division to target the educational market and then shut it down a couple of months later. Sun wanted to rebadge A3000UX unix machines and sell them under its own name. Didn't happen. The CDTV was purposely kept out of the computer sales channel and marketed to stores to sell in their stereo departments, but with so little training, that salespeople barely knew how to change CDs or that it in fact was a computer and could have a keyboard. The jerk they hired from IBM (responsible for the PC jr. no less) virtually shut down engineering development. And of course the money they spent on PC clones, not only Commodore, but Escom, too. :-x
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At one point Bill Gates wasn't all that interested in operating systems, he was more interested in applications, because that's where he thought the money was. (Probably right, but they seem to make money on OSs, too :-D ) For an interesting read about that, look here.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.11/es_apple_pr.html
(Couldn't seem to paste that one in as a URL fo some reason :-? )
Seems to me that Apple made a lot of the same mistakes Commodore did, but at least they advertised and kept up with engineering.
The last thing that did in Commodore was that they were too fragmented. Britain, Germany, and to a lesser extent Canada were doing all right, but the marketing division in the States were complete idiots. Commodore was founded as a business machines company.. typewriters, adding machines, calculators. If they kept Amigas only in the head office, maybe they would have realized some of the deficiencies in software and corrected it . Either by funding ports of Microsoft products, or keeping WordPerfect on board, getting Novell to support it and even Lotus or IBM.
But at one time Gould and Ali were numbers one and two respectively as the most highly paid CEOs in the computer world. More than Bill Gates or the Chairmen of IBM, Compaq, Hewlit Packard, Novell or Sun. There were lots of times when half their salaries spent in the right place could have made all the difference. My considerably more than 2 cents worth. ;-)
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The Amiga's dead?
Piracy burst the Amiga bubble.
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Many have already told it quite well!
If you have never read it before, take the time to read An employee's reflection on how CBM killed the Amiga (http://www.graner.net/editoria.htm) - written some time back by Ed Graner who was shamefully underpaid by CBM:
Unfortunately, many of the ones with Amiga skill and experience are also the ones who are willing to take the low pay, the lack of benefits and the constant lies from CBM. They are willing to only because they love the Amiga.They want to see it succeed. And conversely, Commodore has seen people like me put in 40-50 hour weeks and only turn in 30. They've seen the RPD put up with the lies and the discomfort of the position and their response is not one of gratitude, but one of contempt. And if one quits, then they know the Amiga is good enough to draw another enthusiast into the grinder to take that vacancy.
For those of us still working for Commodore, pity is in order. To those of you who are considering working for Commodore I have some advice: Just say NO to CBM.
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Not too dissimilar to how McDonald's operates.
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Killed off the Amiga? Damn, mine seems to be full of life yet, fact is, I'm using it right now to access Amiga.org. Every time she boots up, I jump up and down hollerin' "It's alive! It's alive!", er' just kiddin'
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Wing Commander and Ultima 6 both came out for the Amiga. And Ultima 6 is a classic, I don't see how it is inferior to the IBM version. Wing Commander came out too although I have not played that.
And Wolfenstein was and is crap, so I doubt it had much to do with it.
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Ultima 6 did come out for the Amiga but here is the rub....
IBM
256 Colour
Fast..did I mention fast?
Amiga
32 Colour
Slow...as in molasses slow on a 68000 amiga
A shameful port that did not take any advantage of superior blitting on the amiga...it basically ported the CPU intense blitting routines of the IBM version. Which brings us to the other game Wing Commander...
It is also pitiful if compared to the IBM version...slow slow slow slow and again could have been soo much better.
Wolfenstein is crap by todays standards but at the time thousands upon thousands of Amiga gamers saw the drop dead gorgeous 3D (albeit pseudo 3d) 256 colour gameplay and sold their amigas. It can not be underestimated how this game (two years before doom) changed the gaming industry.
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If you have never read it before, take the time to read An employee's reflection on how CBM killed the Amiga - written some time back by Ed Graner who was shamefully underpaid by CBM:
Ah, capitalism at it's finest :-)
I hear a lot of sad things from ex-Commodore and ex-Amiga Inc. employees. Are there no unions in the US that could take care of these matters? Especially the credit-card part of the story seems totally unbelievable!
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So there were several reasons.
* Amiga was its time far ahead
* The 'wrong' software
* hardware: 'too little too late'
* Not a standard, nor a specialised niche
* Good enginering bad sales, bad managment
* Good programmers, bad that a lot also cracked programs
It is a wonder that it still lasts at all! :-D
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Edwardo_T wrote:
So there were several reasons.
* Amiga was its time far ahead
* The 'wrong' software
* hardware: 'too little too late'
* Not a standard, nor a specialised niche
* Good enginering bad sales, bad managment
* Good programmers, bad that a lot also cracked programs
It is a wonder that it still lasts at all! :-D
:-) The Amiga spirit will never go away!
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@ CU_AMIGA
How the hell can something alive be dead ? ????????????????????????????????????
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What killed off the Amiga?
I dunno about the rest of you but it was a dodgy PC PSU that killed off my first A1200 :-P
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2 things... Gould and Ali.
I have a baseball bat with thier names on it. :whack:
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1. terrible executive management of Commodore Business Machines
2. software crackers
3. virii
4. (and most importantly) MICROSOFT and pc clones!!!
:crazy:
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I wonder where they are today....
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I remember it was 1992/1993. I had an Amiga. All my mates at school had Amigas - one of whom was seriously into programming - he did his GCSE coursework in Amiga assembler, and has just finished his PhD in Computer Science at Cambridge. We got grapevine, we ran the Amiga club at school, there were even a few attempts to do some music demos. I loved my Amiga.
Now back to three friends who I used to do role-playing with back then. One of them had a PC for a few years - a hand-me-down from his Dad. I kept telling them how good the Amiga was, and I think a couple of them listened, but didn't get one. Then one of them got a PC (his family did anyway). Suddenly there was X-wing, they all loved it...a bit later he got a CD-ROM, Alone in the Dark, Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, Rebel Assault etc etc. Despite all my protestations about how good the Amiga was, that was it, game over....they all have PCs now.
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The Amiga has never been killed off.
It was always the PC busyness part which killed companies like Commodore and Escom.
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Piracy and absolutly nothing to do with it. The Amiga was dead here in the US before the CD rom was widely availible. Piracy happened just as much on the PC as the amiga. As a matter of fact, no system has ever been successful without piracy. This would be due to the fact that people need a critical mass of software availible to them before they will buy hardware.
The upgradability of the A500 was the killer for me. Particularly hard drives. I could pay $500 dollars to add a SCSI hard drive to my Amiga, or I could spend $800 for a brand new computer with an MFM hard drive.
Yeah, yeah, I've heard it. "SCSI is better than MFM". Well who cares what the underlying tech is. All that matters is the user interface. What do I use to put stuff into the computer, and what do I get out.
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From what i've heard it all boils down to:
Commodore bought the Amiga as being the ultimate video games machine which would generate some quick cash; a high risc pet project.
In that pespective, it's not hard to see why things went wrong from day one.
Other things to add to the list:
The release of the A500 in 1985 should have been followed up by some equivalent of the A1200 already in '88-89. Failure to do so meant a delay of advanced software to appear until it was too late. This may have been more significant than most people think. If the x86 hardware would suddenly halt for ten years while the PPC Macs evolved to 15-20GHz CPU speed... ...it's not the best way to attract software developers, is it?
In a sense one could even blame the success of the C64 for the death of the Amiga, since CBM thougt the Amiga would follow the previus pattern of success. One could even claim that the A1000 was released too soon, before the C64 had become outaged.
And then again, if CBM wasn't in financial troubles already after massive investments in x86 factorys then they may have allowed more frequent releases of Amiga hardware. Who knows?
Read the book: 1001 reasons why the Amiga died :-)
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About piracy...
It's just outright ####! If I gave you an illegal copy of Photoshop, does it automaticly means that you otherwize spent $500 buying it, even though you are only going to touch up your wedding pictures and then forget it ever existed?
Or that the average kid that pirated $10000 worth of games would have bought them all if the modem wasn't invented yet?
Where wallets end, piracy begins. It's as simple as that.
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Im>bE wrote:
@ CU_AMIGA
How the hell can something alive be dead ? ????????????????????????????????????
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Well, i already stated that the Amiga wasn't dead just in a pretty bad and uncertain position.
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piracy doesn't kill anything off. If anything, it promotes people. If i play a really good game that i downloaded something, i go and buy it! it's the same in the music buisness, if i download a good mp3, i go to the store and buy it on vinyl! it was the same with amiga, i think it was just bad luck and bad managment. C= went bankrupt just as they were doing brilliantly, but it was their fault as well fro becoming bakrup
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Why, the Atari Falcon030 killed the Amiga of course. :-D (just kidding)
Well, as someone on the ST side of the fence in the era of the great machines, but a big Amiga fan too, the thing that killed off the Amiga is the same thing that killed off the ST -- bad management.
Both Atari and Commodore were WAY ahead of their competition when the STs and Amigas shipped. In 1985, colour graphical computers with multi-voice sound, for less than a base B&W Mac or green-screen IBM XT, were incredible things.
The stuff you could do on either was amazing. Each had its strengths -- the Amiga had incredible sound and colour palettes, the ST had OK colour and sound and a stable hi-res display that didn't flicker at 640 x 400.
The applications for each were ASTOUNDING compared to their contemporaries. By 1987, just two years after introduction, both systems were in their prime. They had apps that put the PC and Mac to shame.
But then what happened?
Nothing.
Atari and Commodore both sat on their laurels and released slightly souped-up machines that didn't address market needs. When I think back to the lost opportunities, I want to cry.
Commodore released the A500, which was a cost-reduced version of the 1000, but otherwise unchanged.
Atari released the Mega ST, which was a recased ST with a blitter and more RAM.
Meanwhile, really really cool apps on the ST moved to the PC, since Atari didn't deliver on its promises for faster hardware, math coprocessors, etc. The AutoCAD software of today grew out of the Cyber Studio on the ST -- if Atari had kept pushing development and come out with an 020 based box (fully possible in the late 1980s) with VGA-type colour palettes at 320 x 200, it would have kept its lead in this area.
Oh, and Commodore came out with the A2000 -- more expandable, but that's about it. And the price was sky-high!
Fast-forward to 1990 or so. Atari had the STE which did little but add extra colours to the palette and SIMM-expandable memory (whoopdee doo!). The A500 was still. . . the A500.
The TT030 and A3000 were both cool machines, but didn't really advance either company's lead and were poor sellers.
By the time the Falcon and A1200 shipped, both companies attention was elsewhere. Commodore's management decided that it could make a killing selling PC clones with no effort at all -- a decision that resulted in losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars when Amiga sales were white-hot.
Atari released the Falcon030, which technically outpointed every other system out there (including the 1200, sorry Amiga partisans ;-) ), and proceeded to SCREW the remaining dealers with no advertising, as it decided to dump computers and focus on the Jaguar.
So Atari abandoned the computer biz, and Commodore allowed the Amiga biz to float with no real direction, as it kept trying over and over to make it big in the PC clone biz.
Commodore ended up getting slaughtered by Dell and Gateway and those guys in the PC biz, while the Amiga languished. The 1200 and 4000 were both kludges rushed to market in an effort to get something, ANYTHING out -- they were NOT where Commodore's engineers wanted them to be.
AGA had been sitting in Commodore's labs for YEARS by the time it shipped in 1992. In 1990, it was earth-shattering and would have buried Atari and Apple both. By 1992, it was old hat -- both the Macintosh and Atari were ahead.
The 3000+ had an AT&T DSP that would have delivered a great degree of sound to the average Amiga user, had Commodore shipped it in the 1200 and the 4000. Instead, they shipped the then-approaching-obsolete Paula, while Atari shipped the Falcon with a DSP and Apple introduced CD-quality sound as a standard feature.
The remarkable thing is that the Amiga thrived through all this inattention. When Commodore went under, Amiga demand was at RECORD levels, despite the severe channel, advertising and product release mismanagement. However, Commodore was so indebted and starved for cash that they couldn't produce enough machines to meet demand and turn a profit and pay the bills. Had Commodore decided in 1990/1991 to focus on the Amiga alone and ride with it, and push forward with the move to RISC (with HP as a partner), the Amiga would have survived and thrived, and Commodore would still be in business today.
The other thing that's killed the Amiga are all the false starts post-Commodore. Commodore and the Amiga, like it or not, are part of each other. Without one, the other cannot survive.
I know there are new clones/machines coming out, but the ST scene saw those too, post-Atari, with C-LAB building Falcons and other companies providing super-advanced clones and new iterations of TOS, but it didn't save the ST scene because Atari's distribution, marketing and name were necessary for success. Ditto for the Amiga. Now that the Commodore R&D, distribution and marketing infrastructure is gone, Amiga pretty much is too. Which is sad because the ST and Amiga were so much better than the Macintosh (let alone Windows) and I cringe to think of how much better the Amiga and ST would have done things if development had continued from the early 1990s on.
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Whos sais AMIGA is dead. Yeah, we might have had a few bankrupsies here and there, so what.
AMIGA is not dead, we continue to release upgrades to the opperating System and we have just released a new Hardware base. Next is the porting of the OS to that hardware Base. We may be bashed-up but we are far from beaten.
Long live AMIGA!
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CU_AMiGA wrote:
So, what was it that sadly killed off the Amiga? Personally i think it was largely to do with piracy, but also a mix of Commodore's poor management and the way they produced machine's that haven't been updated? What does anyone else think?!
In my POV, it’s the failure of the 68K market starting from its heart i.e. Motorola. Practically most of the once dominant 68K vendors are a mere shadow of their former selves.
This is highlighted by the failures of the major 68K desktop PC vendors
1. Atari
2. Commodore
3. Apple
4. Spectrum
Secondly, most of 68K based vendors failed to follow the concept of Moore’s law (i.e. doubling of processing performance at least once a year**).
**Intel’s driving ideology…
Staying with the A500/A600/A1000/A1500/A2000 performance (for mass production solution) from 1985 to ~1991 is completely unacceptable in the long term.
The Amiga 500/1500/2000 should have at least 68000 @16Mhz during 1989 (minimal performance improvements but for the purpose of marketing**).
Commodore should also marketed their Amiga models with PR rating relative to the original Amiga 1000. Similar scheme to AMD’s model reference (i.e. PR rating relative to AMD Athlon Thunderbird core @1.4Ghz). Motorola could adapt this tactic for their 68K lines i.e. referencing from 68000.
Has the PowerPC world learn from AMD yet?
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its like wishing you could go back in time, and give the engineering team (not commodore) a shed load of 020's for A500/2000's at todays prices, 030's and simm slots for A1200s, 040/060's for A4000's with PPC upgrades available.... and PCI instead of ISA in the A4000 range. nothing super fantasitcly out of the imagination like the AAA chipset, just things that should have been done at the time (that management probably throttled) as most people know, the A3000U was for a little while the only 32bit machine out there that could handle multasking, and shipped with a version of Unix. HP and a few other vendors were interested, and asked commodore for the access rights to the kernal, and rom to be able to develope software (OS's, Apps) and hardware (PA risc chips etc.) as the architecture was open enuff (with managements consent) to be able to add things like non 680x0 processors and stuff (re cyberstormPPC / G3 / blah blah blah) and management told them to get stuffed. so i blame management for not wanting to realise what kind of product they had, and wanting to ship PC's instead.
i mean, how many pc vendors pop up and dissappear in the course of a year down your local highstreet?
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great thread, very interesting and brought back alot of memories.
from my point of view, being the kid with the pimples who hung out at the amiga store with a box of floppies copying shareware for hours - here is how I saw it back then.
the games were great. yes I pirated alot of them.. er I should say copied from friends. But I did buy some whenever I had the cash... which was alot. Looking in my F19 Stealth box, it was $65.
So, one time I walk into the amiga store with all my savings. I bought a printer, Kickstart 1.2, external floppy and a 1MB Supra Ram cartridge - all for my A500. Total was $860
A while later I was at a friends house, playing with his x86 - windows 3.0 was just released and it was pretty good. The games weren't very good. He didn't have audio beyond bleeps and bops. We had to unplug the mouse to connect the modem. But there were games, he had a printer and he had OK color.. he also had a hard drive.
So I saved a bit more and walked into the Amiga store looking to buy a hard drive. I believe it was a 40MB (same as my friends x86). They wanted $800 for the hard drive.
Well, that was it for me. I could buy a PC with a printer and hard drive for that price, and for a couple hundred more I could have a Adlib. So I decided to save and buy a loaded PC.
Little did I know it would take years to save that much money. When it happened, I got a 486 Dx2-66 Compaq with over 200MB of hard drive space, a CDrom and everything for $1200 + plus $1400 for a 17" monitor. $300 of that was knocked off by selling my A500 to my brother.
I got my A500 back but all the software is lost. I rescued it from the back porch where it had endured the weather for a few years.
It wouldn't boot up, just a red screen and the power light was pulsating. Cleaned the leaves out of it, and some other crud that looked like ear wax and spun the floppy a few times and now she is slowly starting to come back to life. Had a tear in my eye when I opened her up and saw the chip names on the motherboard that I had forgotten about.
Anyhoo, been searching ebay for workbench now for a few days, hopefully I can find it soon. And if Amiga is coming back, I am all for it. I am sick of windows and windows support. I want a real machine again and just use my PC for games :-D
how ironic.
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Well lots of great stuff so far in this thread. Its all true to some point. As for me I agree 100% it was all commodore that led to it. they did some stupifd things. The whole Piracty thing is
BS. Sure it had some part in it all, but ALL systems have it and they still do well.
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@STUser
Ya know the guys designing the Jaguar had a desktop version of the machine up and running, but Atari management only sold them as Jaguar dev boxes.
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Did it all kill the Amiga or kill Commodore?!
2 reasons for the fall..............
#1 reason was Commodore's management. In the Vic20/C64 days and early Amiga days Commodore was out there. They had small time dealers everywhere. They would fly out to a local Commodore Club and shake hands and show demo's. We had this happen in PoDunk Kansas and got to see the Amiga 1000 before it hit the public. Before long if you couldnt buy so many units you no longer were a dealer. Small computer shops could not afford to buy 1000 Amiga's up front. They cut credit lines and so forth and finally run the little guy out of the market.
#2 was lack of professional software. Things were still in the infant stage in the office world. The Amiga came across as a graphic/artistic computer. There were already new things out for grinding away #'s and data which is what the majority of the business's need. Programming company's saw what Commodore was doing in the marketing and didnt want to spend time developing software for a company in a nosedive. That made things even worse.
I'd say by about 1998 the Windows machines had probably caught up to the Amiga and its abilities. I wonder where the Amiga would be and what it would be doing if Commodore had stayed in business.
THEWASP
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Who killed it? Well Its kinda sleeping ;-)
What will kill it?
Us, unless we stop all the #### and flame.....
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Bobsonsirjonny wrote:
Who killed it? Well Its kinda sleeping ;-)
What will kill it?
Us, unless we stop all the #### and flame.....
WOW! Steady Bobsonsirjonny! I wasn't trying to start anything!
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I saw commodore stand at Cebit this year and they had amiga at their stand. classic amigas :-) nice
the rest was phones
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to be frank, I think the fact that they stopped selling products...well it did more than anything to put a dent in their sales.
What the A1200 was successful, though under spec'd, and even had a 2nd go of it, when released under Escom (by then it was even hopelessly out of date and still sold).
but what came after the A1200? to date, nothing....excluding linux ppc motherboards.
I will consider the next Amiga, to be the one that has OS 4 bundled....and I betcha, sales improve after they release a product people can buy. :-)
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mostly commodores fault... :-(
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I posted a short version of this in another thread (got my fingers off topic there sort of lol) but it applies totally to this thread.
What killed the Amiga:
Piracy, software availablity, users, competitor products, etc., had very little (if anything at all) to do with Commodore going belly up. Commodore priced themselves out of business by screwing over the retailers.
When they introduced the 1000 to all the main large computer dealers across the US and Canada they shot themselves in the foot on the first day. They came in showing this AMAZINGLY powerful computer to guys who were selling 8088's and 8086 based PCs. The dealers were simply blown away at what the 1000 could do in comparison to their highest priced "power house" 8086 8MHz machines. Everyone was all amazed and excited to be able to start selling these extremely powerful computers to all their business clients. Then Commodore went on to explain to them how much they'd sell for.
The dealers invariably assumed $5000 since existing 8MHz 8086 machines sold for $3000 and were nothing in comparison. But no, Commodore's master plan was to retail them for $2195 (I just went back and checked some price sheets, that's without a monitor) AND sell them to the dealers for $1995. All the dealers stopped and said "You expect me to sell this computer, amazing as it may be, to my business clients and make $200 on it? I already make a $1000 mark up selling those 8086 boxes over there. WHERE is my incentive?" Commodore's only response was "But look how cool they are! And besides our marketing campaign hits all the magazines this month with a suggested retail of $2195. You can sell them for less if you want though!"
There was a reason there were only a handful of Amiga dealers across Canada and the USA. There was no money in selling Amigas even IF they were the most powerful computer on the planet. The money was in selling 8086 based PCs. That's why they ended up in every office and not Amigas. BOTH systems had WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 written for them in 1985-86, BOTH systems had equal amounts of business software initially. But who in their right mind would steer a client to a machine they'd make $200 instead of $1000 off of?
Commodore continued this rediculous line of price fixing on every single product line they came out with. When they came out with the A3000, the first really slick business looking Amiga, one that didnt look "like a toy" lots of us in Amiga retail thought it was the second coming and Amigas would start becoming mainstream. Especially so when Commodore initially announced the retail price of $2995 with a dealer cost of $2400 (wow a retailer could finally make $500 off of one of these things!). But, 3 days later the largest 2 retailers in Canada and the USA were selling them for $2595 and 3 days after that Commodore set the new 3000 retail price at $2595 with a dealer cost fo $2485. (Somebody at Commodore decided that the way to get lots of Amigas out there was to lower the retail price, but not lower the cost price) WTF, not only did they raise the retailers cost, now retailers were expected to make $110 selling a $2500 item when they could make $900-$1500 selling a $3000 386 SX12? (Yes, margins on pc's used to be 30% to 50% back in the day...)
That is how Commodore did business, that's why they don't exist anymore. The single largest collection of marketing retards on the planet worked there, it was the most amazing group of inept monkies I and every Amiga retailer across North America have ever met. :-)
If the PC retailers had had even a tiny bit of incentive (ie: the ability to make any money selling an Amiga instead of a PC) that's what everyone would be using today, not clones... No money for the dealers meant no reason to tell businesses and even home users (wasn't too many pc users in the home back then) about the Amiga. No sir, you will really love this 386-SX16 here, yes it's blistering fast, and just look at that beautiful 64 color CGA screen!
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I have no comment on the subject. I find no reason to kick a dead dog, when we all know it was ignorance, greed, narrowmindedness and the simple fact that they didn't care to support the amiga.
In Commodore's mind, the Amiga had already served its purpose...to get them in the PC market, where they failed miserably. :-(
I still can't help but laugh about the PCjr, though. What a piece of sh!t.
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Thats is completely. C= went bust, this caused the demise of Amiga.They lost huge amount of money in thier PC sector, this caused C= to go bust. They lost huge amounts of money in the PC sector because of poor management.They should never, in my opinion, even entered the PC market and focussed on Amiga's completely.
I just wanted to clarify something here, the above is completely untrue and unfounded. (Whomever gave you that info was mistaken.)
Commodore Canada (the division of Commodore I have the most knowledge about, I know a little about Commodore USA) sold more PC clones than IBM and Compaq combined, in Canada, during the time that Commodore was in business. Actually, from 1985-1988 they sold more PC clones than every other manufacturer combined and were the #1 selling PC in Canada for 4 years in a row with their CBM lineup. Their numbers in the USA weren't as impressive, but they were certainly more profitable than their Amiga numbers. I recall the Vice President, Duncan Frasier, at Commodore Canada saying to us that their PC sales were more than 3 times their Amiga sales, and I know that their profit margins on their PC sales was more than twice that of the Amiga (maybe more like four times).
The number one selling "Personal Computer" in North America after 1985 was the Amiga 500, followed by the CBM (Commodore Business Machines) PC-10/PC-20 product line. The PC-10 and PC-20 sold more units than all IBM PC lines for 3 years in a row. No other company has sold as many computers of one model than Commodore. They still have that record three times: with the C64, the Amiga 1.3 line (500/1500/2000/2500 are all the same computer, they just have different shapes), and the PC-20.
Commodore Canada was still in the black to the tune of ~$37 million profit in the final quarter when Commodore USA filed for chapter 11. They were mainly in the black because of their PC line (you could ask anyone in management there at the time and they'd tell you point blank that they were doing well with their PC division; way better than with their Amiga division which was entirely dependant on a single Canadian retailer - Computer Answers - for over 75% of their Amiga sales). CA sold something in the region of $20-25 million worth of Amiga's via mail order through magazines like Amazing Computing and Amiga magazine alone.
If you compare Commodore's numbers with Packard Bell, who became the #1 PC clone manufacturer in 1991 and continued to be #1 through 1997 (I worked for Beny Alagem who owned Packard Bell, before selling it to NEC, btw), you'll see that even when Packard Bell was the #1 clone seller in North America they still had a lower final profit than Commodore Canada during PB's volume sales periods in 1990-1994.
Commodore went belly up because of the way they price fixed their Amiga hardware lines, and forced retailers to sell PC clones instead of Amigas through sheer economics (retailers who are in business to make money selling a product, they're not in business to break even selling a product because it's cool or because they love it). There was no incentive for a retailer, or especially that retailers sales staff to direct a computer shopper towards an Amiga. You had to explain how much more the computer could do, how amazing it was compared to a PC, and all that for next to no money. When a customer came in saying "Hi I want to buy a PC, it was easier to just say sure, here's one we have for $2100," instead of having to explain to them for an hour why the $1900 Amiga system was the better choice. You made $500 from the instant PC sale, and $120 from the Amiga sale. A salesman on comission would be crazy to direct a person to a computer they'd make $18 off after an hours work instead of the one they'd make $75 in 15 minutes. You can't blame that salesman for doing that.
Pouring money into development the Amiga, and changing product lines 3/4 of the way through the engineering phase is bad business when you aren't selling enough product because only 10 primary retailers have enough passion for your product to bother selling it. The Commodore PC product line was what kept the Amiga alive from 1986 through 1993, that's where they made the lion's share of their money. You do also have to factor in the consistent selling and buying back of Commodore stock by the top 3 executives in CBM US, that cycle made the stock completely unattractive to large investors so there was no money to be had through public selling of more shares (not that they wanted to do that, if you look at the performance of Commodore stock for the last 4 years it traded, you can see them sell large blocks at $2.50, driving the price down to $1.60 then buy it back at $1.60 and let it grow back. Then, mix and repeat). CBM US executives made a forture doing that, why worry about the regular business and customers when you can make millons manipulating your own stock price because you 3 guys personally own 90% of the publicly trading shares?
All that being said, the engineers at Commodore sure made some incredible computers. Their PC line was at the time the only true "compatible" (you could use any card you wanted in them, while IBM, Radioshack, Compaq, etc all had proprietary slots and cards in one form or another CBM didnt), and their Amiga line was groundbreaking and as powerful with 1993 technology as any PC would be right up to the middle of 1999.
But don't believe for a minute that Commodore didn't make good money selling PCs, Amiga users just went through their days unaware of it because most were so anti-anything-besides-my-Amiga to notice. :-)