So basically Haynie and friends legacy of work would have died and Amiga would have become yet another Windows machine (albeit on a RISC platform). Sounds like a losing proposition.
Frankly, this part of the story make me MORE satisfied with where we, the community, took the platform.
We're still here, and Haynie is history.
Actually the processor being developed for Hombre was chosen because, though it didn't have 68k emulation modes like the PowerPC, its instructions were close enough to 68k to make porting easier. The designers of the Hombre wanted AmigaOS, management didn't since they wanted a machine to sell more quickly to make money which Commodore was running out of (or had run out of) at the time. So taking an OS off the shelf (Windows NT) was a faster way to do that.
You can see easily from the documents he has released from the later days at Commodore, that the designs as documented never had an intention of omitting the Amiga Operating System but making the Amiga modular to make it easier to adapt it to the accelerating developments in hardware by companies dedicated to specific parts. Something Commodore could not do as a general developer anymore especially with less money going to chip development.
Their work on the DSP that should have been in a 3000+ (I recall reading about that machine in magazines back in the day and being excited at what it could do) was proven a winner by the well regarded Macs that came out much later. It certainly wasn't the engineers choice to drop that.
Having the first 040 card during the 3000 debut which was apparently so impressive that Motorola would come with a gold chip just to show it, only to have management decide not to show it was another thing you cant fault the people creating the designs.
Commodores desire to sell (when they did try to sell something) for a low price was more a threat to the company then the designs. Amiga was a much more complex and capable design than Macintosh. Apple could surely build the Mac for a lot less than an Amiga just take a look at the motherboards to see that and couple that with less software development the original Macs being black and white and single tasking, but sold them for more money. Same thing they still do to this day with their iPhones and iPads and did with the Apple II. Each Mac (or anything else) Apple sold put more money in their bank. They never cut price to the bone like Commodore did. Not something that can even remotely be blamed on the engineers developing the products.
