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
