Why did Amiga lack support from Adobe and Wolfram?

[psxphill]

If I was going to make a DTP package in 1987, I would also have chosen the Atari over the Amiga, simply because the price for an equivalent Amiga package would have been twice that of the Atari, given the extra expense of the flicker fixer, hard drive and laser printer.

Yes. Times were different, people who had never used a computer before would buy one to run one piece of software.

The ST hardware was inferior in many ways but that mainly affected games. The built in midi, hard drive port & progressive high resolution video gave it a real boost in certain markets.

I was playing games and wasn't doing DTP or image manipulation, so I had an Amiga connected to an old TV set.

[warpdesign]

In 1987, the Amiga 2000 which had a 68000, ocs chipset with 640x480x16 colors which was quite slow was competing with the Mac 2 which came with a 68020, could be expanded to 21mb ram and came with a gfx card capable of 256col/16bit palette and 512x384 and 640x480.

This isn't even comparable. By 1987 in terms of graphics and CPU power there was already something much better than the Amiga. Of course, it was twice the price of the a2000 but you get something much better for serious work.

The 68020 was quickly replaced with a 68030+68882. And in 1989 the IICi was released with onboard video. Memory could be extended to 128mo ram with onboard Sim slots. You could drive three simultaneous monitors with 3 graphic cards.

In 1990 the Amiga 3000 came with basically the same graphics capabilities: 16 colors max in high resolutions, 12bit palette (that's 5 years after the a1000), and a 68030+68882 and ability to expand memory to up to 16mb.

The Amiga also sold only a few millions of units in its entire lifetime, most of which were simple A500 with no harddrive.

And then Photoshop was released..

So: why do you think Adobe didn't bother making an Amiga version of Photoshop?

[pwermonger]

Some of the Apple history books mention Adobe since the two companies were very close when the Mac was developed. Been a while since I read them but I Would not doubt there was support direct from Apple to try to keep them like this and money or hardware that got them to develop for Mac in the first place considering PCs were far outstripping Mac, and early Macs were hardly capable machines even for their niche market. Apple also licensed Postscript from Adobe for the main printer for the Mac in DTP, the laserwriter. This meant money to  Adobe who had all their major software on Mac since it helped to sell fonts to Mac users.
 
Adobe made a lot on selling fonts back then. You bought Photoshop once, for instance, but you would have to buy Adobe fonts for each of your DTP stations everytime you wanted new typefaces.
 
Then Apple decided to go to Microsoft who had a clone of Postscript called TrueType and license that as an alternate font system for the Mac. As most clones go, the fonts were cheaper and it was already in use in Windows meaning lots of fonts and printer support was alreayd available.
 
So once Apple fired this 'shot' at their partner, Adobe decided to fire back. Knowing their software was what was making the Mac de-facto for DTP and graphics art they ported the golden eggs to Microsoft's platform. At this time, of course, Windows had a much larger market than Amiga and made the more logical choice as a way to slap Apple's hands and in 1992 brought Photoshop over to Windows and Illustrator in 1997.  They also ignored Apples advances in the OS, refusing to use things like Quickdraw which ensured those parts of the OS would never become mainstream.
So, if Commodore (who never released a laser printer like Apple did, since DTP was not their focus for Amiga) had courted Adobe at the beginning things might have been different.
 
If Apple had screwed over Adobe sooner before it was clear Commodore like Mac was steadily losing ground to Microsoft things also might have been different and Adobe might have ported their software over to Amiga instead being a more capable machine, or even the ST.
 
So this would be a reason that makes logical sense for the lack of Adobe on Amiga

[Fizza]

First of all, Quark was never viable on the Amiga,

Although I'll not say you are not correct in the fact that Quark maybe made the mistake of not advancing their software, or basing it too heavily on one technology tied to an OS, the main reason why Quark lost out on the Page Layout market is due to the Adobe's decision to release Creative Suite, after that it was all over because you basically got InDesign for free, which negated all risk for publishers/designers to give it a try as Photoshop/Illustrator/Acrobat were basically de facto anyway. And this was when InDesign was only really just pulling ahead feature/usability wise from Quark, but it was enough to pretty much convince everyone to switch.

But going away from that for a minute, early on, Quark would have worked on an A2000 no problem, in '92-'94 there was a ton of magazines etc.. being laid out on monochrome/grayscale screened Macs. And having seen Pagestream 3, I found that to be quite similar in feel, albeit minus the Mac interface differences.

Add to the fact that due to the graphics market was the main provider of sales it naturally drove the hardware to tailor itself to it. In '86-89 I don't think a lot of what we take for granted as given qualities for the Mac platform for graphics was as locked down or inevitably to follow as may be suggested when looking at historical timelines. What I said was that Commodore should have gone after that segment of the market, which would have entailed responding to it accordingly. The point made above about Shapeshifter literally out performing Mac's on equivalent or lesser hardware only confirms that it was very possible. Even my lowly AGA A1200 030 back in the day ran Shapeshifter pretty nicely, certainly usable, not for high end stuff photo manipulation of course, but then the equivalent Mac wouldn't have been chosen either, but many design/layout projects could be undertaken quite satisfactorily.

It's not always about the high-end, yes it's great bragging rights, but you get the usability sorted along with a good price/performance ratio, then if you can get critical mass, you're in. Amiga was in many ways most of what the Mac promised to deliver but failed for many years.

In some ways, all Commodore would have needed to do was to show you could continue working while copying files from a Syquest drive, the amount of time wasted up till OS X, OS 9 was terrible in that aspect, and when time/deadlines = money, it makes a pretty convincing argument. That is, if it had been made in the first place of course.

[motrucker]

Some one hit on the real problem, which was power. The Amiga just didn't have enough for far to long. The 68000 cpu was a great chip, but just wasn't powerful enough.
That why Word Perfect quite development on the Amiga. Their V5 needed way more power than the 68K could offer. WP needed at least a 68030 to run. While there there were accelerators with this chip, there was no Amiga model with it. The Amiga 3000 was just to late in coming.
While there may have been other reasons, this was surely the main one.