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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: tokyoracer on May 31, 2006, 12:52:08 PM
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I had a thought that maybe amiga could have been going on today, making computers if thay done more market research. I cant really deside what caused the company going bust as i thought id ask you guys for your view. So as title... What was Amiga's worst move?
Chris.
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I think that the worst move was when Commodore dismissed the original team of Amiga (Lorraine). These group of engineers made the a impressive machine... why to dismisse the team? this and a bad marketing from Commodore, and some wrong ways, like A600 with ECS and 68k, it would be better with AGA and 68020...
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did they have the ability to insert AGA and a 68k20 into the 600 then?
and if they did - would that have meant it would have been likely that the 1200 would have even been a greater machine you think?
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i think amigas future would have been alot different if commodore had really pushed the amiga into the professional arena, it was way more capable than the PC and Apple at the time, but commodore didnt capitalise on this.
Commodore should also have not deverted resources away from amiga R+D into making crappy PC's.
Amigas should have moved with the times, the A500 and A2000 were on the market way to long when you consider that Apple was using 68020s and 030, way before commodore decided to refresh the range.
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did they have the ability to insert AGA and a 68k20 into the 600 then?
Yep, the A600 was a late machine, the reason they made it a 68000 and ECS though was that a lot of people were still buying the A500 and A500+ when the A1200 was launched.
The A500 was expensive to make, the A600 was simply aimed to cut the cost of the A500 by making it smaller.
The A1200 was a good machine when it came out, they couldnt do much more, it was an A4000 in an A500 case and it filled that role 100%.
In answer to the original question the answer for a long time was that the PC side was making a massive loss, Amiga went down without loosing any money.
That said Im not sure its correct, it just doesnt feel righ does it?
I think its more a fact that Amiga didnt push people to upgrade and as much as people hate the PC for making people change their PC when they buy a new machine there is snobbery in saying "I have the best PC, its a AMD 64Bit Venice, etc"
The Amiga never had that, no computer before the PC needed the user to upgrade to play the new game.
When the A500 got old and out of date people didnt look for a new Amiga, they looked for a new computer, they either went for the playstation games console or a PC.
PS: Amiga was a brand, Commodore was the company.
PPS: Its just sad that Commodore UK's buyout of CBM didnt go ahead, they said they had the money to cover the dept and they could restart production there and then, then the liquidators turned around and said "no, your bankrupt too" and that was that, where did that money go? Commodore UK was big, how come the dept couldnt be sorted by selling the UK/German/ all the other Commodore buildings over sea's?
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Is this a trick question?
C Snyder
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Amiga or should we just say Commodore, had aweful coustomer service particularly here in North Amarica. Most people were turned off by there service and that alone will kill a company. Over in the UK they wer better but they needed the north Amarican market to get enough market share to stay above water. That never happend as here the Amiga never got a good foothold. For some time (in the UK) in the late 80s early 90s the Amiga outsold the PC almost 2 to 1 only the Mac did better. Here they never really even showed up other than the A4000 with the Toaster and Flyer.
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Hi Tony
Didnt the retailers compensate? I mean I bought my CDTV from Calculus and when I had a fault I talked to them, not Commodore UK.
Commodore's only customer relations seemed to be at shows or placing adverts (large adverts right outside Sega saying "to be this good would take Sage ages")
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The retailers had there hands tied as they to had to deal with the burocracy. I new the guy here where I live that owned one of the Amiga Stores and he always said that it was not a good situation (this was before there were visable signs on Comodore having troubles).
The store owners did there best to help us coustomers with warrentee but it all depended on availability of parts and so forth.
Im happy with my setup but its a true shame Commodore wasent smarter in how they did things.
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umm, wasn't it there heavy investments in PC clones that caused the debt?
If they had just been happy selling 64's, 128's and Amigas, they would have been fine.
They had descent coders and could have slowly moved into the business market.
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well if you read Commodore history you'll realize it was a very little organization compared to the big ones in the league (ibm, apple, ....) the engineer section was small but they had a great success with the vic and c64. by the time of 1985 Commodore was already in financial trouble.
Consider that then Commodore bought Amiga project and spent an awful lot of money for it. Then it bring all the production in house which was a tremendous effort for the time (MOS was really pushed to its limit).
After all the Amiga didn't sold it much to let Commodore survive and don't blame Commmodore that much. It's really difficult to make a successful machine and 80's made a lot of disaster among companies, all had their problems. Commodore was only more fragile than others...
The main mistake for me is doing a game machine but pretending at the same time to be an office machine when the market was already taken by one or two standard. Placing a totally different standard (despite emulators, bridge boards) and lackness of compatible office software made Amiga out of the big league: IBM, MSDOS, and Apple set the standard which C= didn't follow.
Doing PCs seemed right at the time (everyone just did it, everyone) but maybe it was already unfocused as activity: what is your product AMIGA or the PCs?
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My opinions on Commodore's greatest mistakes:
1. Cancelling the A3000+. This would have introduced AGA in mid 1991 instead of late 1992 and kept the Amiga's foot in the door during the rise of VGA.
2. Botching the deal with Sun to use the A3000UX as an OEM low-end Unix workstation. Should have been easy money.
3. Replacing the A500+ with the A600, which was designed to be the botton-of-the-line entry-level model to complement the A500.
And there are of course a gazillion others, but without these 3 I think they might have lasted longer.
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For starters, the revovling-door managerial situation meant that no one with sufficient balls to save the company ever became CEO, this leads us to the root cause fairly quickly - Irving Gould. This man is basically Darth Vader and Satan's love-child; reading through the histories written about CBM it seems like he really wanted to kill the company.
Mehdi Ali and his Amiga Jr - man was that guy a real bar-steward.
AAA - was in development from '89 was it? Should have had EVERYTHING poured into that and got it to market around '91-'92 at the latest. AGA was never much more than a stopgap and a pathetic improvement over (O/E)CS given the movement in the Clone market at that time.
Constant rebranding of the same machine and selling it for nearly a decade? The A600 was meant to be the 300 - a cheaper replacement for the 500, like the C64C was to the C64, except it actually cost MORE to produce than the 500+ and offered no improvement in capability and screwed up any games that needed the numbpad. Not good for what was nothing more than a glorified games machine.
The 3000+ cancellation as has been said - though by that stage AAA should have already have been finished if CBM were to have survived.
The lack of any substantive money in R&D - ties in again with AAA.
The investment in the clone market - stepping on their own toes for very little profit - if any.
The continuation of the 8bit line - the C128(D(CR)) and C64C should never have been developed. After the debaclé of the TED series (C116/C16/+4/264/V364) they should have killed all 8bit development in favour of that 900 thingy they had in dev before the Amiga turned up. As for the C65 - doorstop anyone?
Speaking of the 900 - shouldn't have cancelled it. Server market is big, that thing could have really helped out CBM.
Basically with no one in charge, no one was really accountable for the devastating string of managerial disasters caused by Commodore simply having no direction.
As much as I hate to say it, they would have been better off with Tramiel.
P.S. Tramiel staying would of course have meant the Amiga never would have happened as it was his Atari that funded Amiga-Lorraine development since Atari had nothing of their own worth developing at the time.
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I think the worst thing they did was spending more money on develoment than their sales allowed. If only they had got the next chipset out the story would have been so much different but they spent copious amounts of money on R&D which kept them ahead for a while but demolished them financially.
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In my humble opinion there was no "worst move". It was a series of related moves that caused CBM to fall...
As many companies before and after them they had no real strategy for their products. I think this is mainly to do with bad leadership. Too many people have their say in the organization and you end up with competeing productlines and no real market-strategy.
Just look at their products: The Commodore 64 line and it's derivatives was kept going way too long. Just because the silly little machine made it to the Guiness Book Of Records they didn't have to keep it going for years after the world had switched to 32bits on most every computer-platform.
Then they had a PC (x86) based lineup. These computers weren't all bad compared to the competitors at the time, but as I recall they were not competitively priced.
The Amiga was never really branded - it was a games machine in Europe, a video workstation in the US. And Lord knows what else... It was never communicated to the world what the machine really was. Now we might see this as great because we know what the Amiga really IS, but to the average consumer a computer with no message or identity is just that....
And to top it all off, CBM had a server-lineup. Who knows what they intended with that one. They didn't want the Amiga to be a UNIX machine because it would confuse the buyers. They didn't want to "OEM" it to SUN for whatever reason... But they poured R&D-funding into the CBM 900 - again with no clue as to where they wanted to go with it. And that machine WAS a UNIX-based contraption.
Do you see what I'm getting at...?! :-?
Commodore was all over the place - and I have seen up close and personal what that does to a company!!
The Amiga, of course, suffered from all of this.
There was noone at CBM that was tough enough to kill the 8bit product-line and sell off the PC-lineup.
So the Amiga had to compete with it's mothercompany's own products - and trust me when I say, that is A LOT harder than having to compete with other products in the real world...
CBM should have focused solely on the Amiga.
They were just too small to compete with IBM and the other PC-monsters.
With focus on the Amiga-line they should have developed the machines identity within the market it targeted. Not try and have it compete with Nintendos, PCs, Macs and whatever.
Home computers, designer workstations, Video workstations - and maybe a relabeled UNIX-machine with a server line to hook it up to... Come to think of it, this is where the CBM 900 would fit neatly into the equation.
It would have been a great world today if companies ran Amigas at the business end, and CBM 900 derivatives in the server room. Mmmmmmmmmm....
If I only had the chance to run Commodore for a few years... But sadly I was only 12 years old in 1988, and I had no idea about how to run a business... :-D
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No investing enouph in AAA.
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mehdi ali
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The big blunder that I never hear stated was the huge mistake of insisting on SCSI for hard drives. Towards the end of the line here in California, a A500 Cost $300. A hard drive for that same machine was ~$500. People didn't mind paying $300 for a hard drive when the computer cost $2000. But when the computer cost $300, $500 is just too much. The benefits of SCSI just didn't offer anything to most users.
This relegated Amiga to only using floppies, and thus limited the size of applications. As programs got bigger, this became a real problem. No one wanted to play a game that came on 10 disks if they couldn't install it to a hard drive.
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It was all my fault. I will take the blame. :-(
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The big blunder that I never hear stated was the huge mistake of insisting on SCSI for hard drives
Actually the A500 never had SCSI drives, that was kept for the professional Amiga's like the A2000, the A590 (Commodore's Amiga 500 harddrive) used the ST508(?, that real old standard PC's used before IDE) to keep it cheap, harddrives still cost to much though.
Even Commodore's A2000 SCSI cards had the ST508 port.. I dont know but even the A2500 may have came with an ST508.
So :P
Same goes for the later stuff, The A4000T had SCSI but the A1200 didnt, heck the A4000 didnt either.
That said Commodore didnt force the users to fit a harddrive until the A1200/A600 was out, which was way to late, it should have been a recommended upgrade for the A500+ and required in the A2000.
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AGA was a horrific disappointment. AAA was way late. Commodore wasted too much time and money on projects nobody wanted. That's about it.
I remember seeing the original A4000's when they were released, and the painfully slow screen refreshes in hi-res with only 16 colors. I knew right then and there Commodore made no "real" improvements to the chipset, and they weren't going to make it (of course, I pre-ordered my A1200 anyway).
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Hi,
for me it was C= Commercial system that was the real faillure...
Here, commercials sellers at C= sold to every big commercial center very huge amount of machines with nice discount and promised to take them back the unsold after 2/3 months at the full price... and with a nice bonus for the commercials...
This made a big loss of income.
Very few repair compagnies were allowed to repair C= machines, so there was lot of money spending in Shiping and handling ...
The Floppy drives were also a big loss of money, it was each time replaced and cost 1/3 of the final machine price, so no profit at all... and don't forget the technician time to pay ... :-?
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The worst possible move was having idiots run C= that didn't have a freaking clue or plan. All they did was react to events.
Like any aircraft accident, there wasn't a single blunder, but a series of small blunders that acted like a domino effect that leads to a catastrophic accident. C= should have had a premium customer service beyond a decent base customer service. C= should have trusted their engineers and accept them as a full fledge member of management team. C= failed to accept they needed a baseline nitch market (AV market), worked with AV companies in a unified developement push.
C= failed to keep the Amiga current with x86 (486), they should have spent the money on porting AOS to x86 and setup and spun off a x86-AOS company with minimum cash drain plus turn a blind eye to piracy. This is exactly what M$ for decades, whine about it and let piracy push M$ into ever office and home. Let the tiny AOS/x86 company fail after maximum saturation and allow the clone OEM to license at a really cheap rate AOS. Most of Amiga folks would never go to x86 back then so there is little worry about losing us to x86 sales.
C= also failed to buy at discount rate, failed AOS software houses' IP. Had C= started to spend minimum cash for the better titles, they could once again accessed cheap coding markets that were beginning in India. Port the games and decent apps to x86 and offer it to the x86 OEMs for minimum money in addition to AOS allowing the OEM to resell it on CD as value added content. Doing all the above for say a fifth of what M$ wanted would given C= a foothold in the markets across the board.
Dammy
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@dammy
Bare in mind that in '90 to '92 it wasn't obvious that the x86 would be a viable alternative to other chips around... the 68k was still strong... the PPC had just started to be pushed... there were MIPS and ARM... not to mention the PA-RISC and the Alpha....
Only by about 97/98 did the x86 start to pull ahead of all the competition.
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wow, like the other posters, they made too many bad moves to count, apart from all of the PC division problems and UNIX mistakes, some of my Amiga related highlights are:
AGA:
Too late to market, instead of overtaking the PC's of the day it barely caught up with them.
CDTV:
A disaster in every way, overpriced obsolete hardware and unfocused marketing which not only detracted people from buying the thing it confused people about what amigas were. Now if they could only have made a more powerful A1200 with a built in CDROM drive in a Walker type case (which I've always had a soft spot for :-) back in '91 I think they could have expanded their market instead of having it contract with newer machines.
Amiga OS:
Took half a decade to get from 1.1 to 2.0
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I'd say lack of advertising was a death wish for CBM. After owing a c64 for 3 years, living in the US, and being an avid reader of CBM centric magazines, I bought a C128 first quarter of 1986 not even knowing the A1000 exsisted. (6 months later I learned my mistake. Apparently advertising depended on where you lived. Some received it, but large parts of the world did not. And those markets that did see advertising, still saw a game machine instead of a serious business box. Lack of advertising and poor presentation in the advertising CBM did do were the largest mistakes in my mind. Execs at CBM had to be nuts. Sink millions in to development and production, but then keeping it all a secret hoping "word of mouth" would sell the system? Arrogance in the face of future giants Apple and MicroSoft.
And from the "What If" files....
What if Amiga would have been absorbed in to Atari? If I recall the history correctly, Amiga owed Atari a large amount of money. If it was not payed back by the deadline, all assest would have belonged to Atari. At the last minute CBM stepped in and payed the bills and purchased Amiga. In the end Atari met a similar end to CBM, but would that history have been changed if they owned Amiga instead of CBM? Maybe not. Atari never did much better at avertising their machines either from my recollection. And they had no intention of hiring the original Lorraine team, so the out come would have been vastly different for sure.
Plaz
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Plaz wrote:
And from the "What If" files....
What if Amiga would have been absorbed in to Atari? If I recall the history correctly, Amiga owed Atari a large amount of money. If it was not payed back by the deadline, all assest would have belonged to Atari. At the last minute CBM stepped in and payed the bills and purchased Amiga. In the end Atari met a similar end to CBM, but would that history have been changed if they owned Amiga instead of CBM? Maybe not. Atari never did much better at avertising their machines either from my recollection. And they had no intention of hiring the original Lorraine team, so the out come would have been vastly different for sure.
Plaz
Atari wanted to use the Amiga hardware to make a system that would basicly have been a "better ST"... AmigaOS would have gone, and some of the amiga's more osoteic features would have been forgotten... They wanted a 16bit games console nothing more
Atari's fate would not have changed. Imagine if Apple had bought the Amiga team... :idea:
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Not letting the Germans kill Fleecy when they had the chance.
-Tig
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The worst move in the history of Amiga was when they backed off from the deal with Atari. Why? Partly because Amiga would then never have gotten competition from the Atari ST, and partly because Atari was a more wellknown company than Commodore.
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plasma wrote:
The worst move in the history of Amiga was when they backed off from the deal with Atari. Why? Partly because Amiga would then never have gotten competition from the Atari ST, and partly because Atari was a more wellknown company than Commodore.
Did you totally miss my post or what? Atari would have failed just as they did, they would never have used the Amiga technology as a complete package, we would never have known the Amiga.
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Plaz wrote:
I'd say lack of advertising was a death wish for CBM. After owing a c64 for 3 years, living in the US, and being an avid reader of CBM centric magazines, I bought a C128 first quarter of 1986 not even knowing the A1000 exsisted. (6 months later I learned my mistake. Apparently advertising depended on where you lived.
Plaz
You can say that again. My first Amiga was an A3000T with a Video Toaster 4000. Unbenounced to me Commodore had already anounced the release of the A4000D If I had known I would have saved up a bit more and bought it instead. I had not seen any advertizments for it. So I had to wait for two years before I could aford to upgrade to it.
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So I guess we can agree that Commodore management was Amiga's worst move ? :-) however those days are over, what about today ?
What is Amiga's worst move today?
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What is Amiga's worst move today?
What isn't Amiga's worst move today? The only good thing about today's Amiga Inc is that the platform is already commercially dead, so they can't make it much worse.
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I'm just dissapointed that after all the blunders, many other companies after Commodore who took up the reigns and had the oppertunity to once again develop the platform in to a vaible alternative, have not learnt from Commodore's mistakes and have instead made just as many bad mistakes to keep the AMIGA where it is seen to be today.
I foten think how wonderful the world of computing and technolegy would be now had the AMIGA flourished and developed today like the IBM clone PC has.
My one wish today is that somehow, the platform can be revisited and developed in to a new breed of computing. Cut away some of the limitations of todays computers and make a real "Peoples" computer once again.
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Bare in mind that in '90 to '92 it wasn't obvious that the x86 would be a viable alternative to other chips around...
IIRC, Haynie stated about the time that of C='s death was the time the x86 was really picking up steam. I will point out that is when he decided against Zorro IV and was going to go with PCI. C= guessed the the big market was indeed x86, they just botched it with the 486 speed increase issues.
Playing Monday Morning Quarterback for a minute, what C= shoud have done was started to panic early about having massive stocks of PCs sitting in the warehouses and losing value by the day. Had they paniced early and really hard, they may have thought that the only way to pass off 486s as viable and somewhat expensive boxes was to:
1. Port AOS to it.
2. Put Amiga gfx chipset onto a PCI card and bundle with #1.
3. Call it Amiga 5000 and roll on.
Dammy
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What is Amiga's worst move today?
Coupons? :-) Oh wait, that still is a bit in the past.
Today, right now, the big mistake is still the old mistake. I fear OS4 will be released, hardware will be expensive and scarce and the only place you will know any thing about it is right here on the amiga sites. While Amiga goes with out advertising once again, Amiga Inc. is touting gambling games for your cell phone. (BTW, this is not a slap at Hyperion) This time it may be even more pathetic. At least in the past many knew the name commodore and there was some small advertising and word of mouth. This time who outside these sites knows Hyperion, Amiga Inc. ACK, Elbox and cares? I'll put $20US on a bet that no one has an advertising budget or even a pipe dream of a plan for a budget. And I don't count banner ads on Amiga sites. Go ahead make me happy prove me wrong and take my $20.
Plaz
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What is Amiga's worst move today?
Amiga Inc's manage has failed to commit seppuku, to atone for their botched management actions and decisions.
What really is sad is that I can say with a stright face, I pine for the days of Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali. The Billed&Fleeced Show has devolved into something so pathetic, they make Gould and Ali look competent and professional.
Dammy
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That C= persisted with OCS and ECS for so long has some positive benefits, the A500 had a very long and stable commercial life compared with other platforms.
AGA was a mistake, being too little too late, most A500 owners (ie the commerially viable userbase) didnt make the jump to AGA machines and got left behind. The A500's poor upgradability didnt help. AGA machine pricing and value take some blame too.
C= couldve managed the transition from O/ECS to AGA better by focussing all their resources on the problem, advertising, consolidating product lines and trimming the fat, maybe?
But it was late in the day, and the Amiga had already lost face as a serious computer at a time when people started wanting serious (work) computers to do home accounts, word processing and not just play games.
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What is Amiga's worst move today?
Among a million other things, they could try fixing their website.
If you try to buy something from their online store, Firefox pops up a warning message saying that their security certificate expired in December 2005.
Assuming they actually want to sell anything, they might want to get it renewed - when you're just about to give your credit card number and personal details over the Internet, a big red warning box telling you the website isn't secure may put some people off.
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dammy wrote:
Bare in mind that in '90 to '92 it wasn't obvious that the x86 would be a viable alternative to other chips around...
IIRC, Haynie stated about the time that of C='s death was the time the x86 was really picking up steam. I will point out that is when he decided against Zorro IV and was going to go with PCI.
PCI isn't x86... it was just developed by intel... The whole industry embraced it.
C= guessed the the big market was indeed x86, they just botched it with the 486 speed increase issues.
Playing Monday Morning Quarterback for a minute, what C= shoud have done was started to panic early about having massive stocks of PCs sitting in the warehouses and losing value by the day. Had they paniced early and really hard, they may have thought that the only way to pass off 486s as viable and somewhat expensive boxes was to:
1. Port AOS to it.
2. Put Amiga gfx chipset onto a PCI card and bundle with #1.
3. Call it Amiga 5000 and roll on.
Dammy
You speak as if Commodore was a competant company!!! Don't forget that none of the sections communicated, they were all in competition for budgets... I think dave pointed out that no one in the Amiga teams even knew of the CDTV until it was ready for market... And of the Teams which were working on Amiga systems, even they didn't know what each other was doing. It was just like Apple before they got Jobs back in, All the 80's computer companies died in the 90's... Only apple survived because Jobs is an arrogant MoFo. I doubt if the Amiga teams knew much of the Commodore IBM-PC and vice versa...
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snowman040 wrote:
What is Amiga's worst move today?
Not investing on their own assets and the classics ecosystem. They would not have taken over the world but could have made lots of money.
Intent was a great technology but overpriced. They licence the SDK for several thounds dollars when at the same time SUN and Microsoft give Java and .Net for free.
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bloodline wrote:
Plaz wrote:
And from the "What If" files....
What if Amiga would have been absorbed in to Atari? If I recall the history correctly, Amiga owed Atari a large amount of money. If it was not payed back by the deadline, all assest would have belonged to Atari. At the last minute CBM stepped in and payed the bills and purchased Amiga. In the end Atari met a similar end to CBM, but would that history have been changed if they owned Amiga instead of CBM? Maybe not. Atari never did much better at avertising their machines either from my recollection. And they had no intention of hiring the original Lorraine team, so the out come would have been vastly different for sure.
Plaz
Atari wanted to use the Amiga hardware to make a system that would basicly have been a "better ST"... AmigaOS would have gone, and some of the amiga's more osoteic features would have been forgotten... They wanted a 16bit games console nothing more
Atari's fate would not have changed. Imagine if Apple had bought the Amiga team... :idea:
Why did Atari make the Atari ST then? That wasn't a game console, was it? It was even released before the Amiga IIRC.
Anyway what makes you think that the Amiga team wouldn't be able to convince Atari to use AmigaOS? It was far better than GEM OS.
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plasma wrote:
bloodline wrote:
Plaz wrote:
And from the "What If" files....
What if Amiga would have been absorbed in to Atari? If I recall the history correctly, Amiga owed Atari a large amount of money. If it was not payed back by the deadline, all assest would have belonged to Atari. At the last minute CBM stepped in and payed the bills and purchased Amiga. In the end Atari met a similar end to CBM, but would that history have been changed if they owned Amiga instead of CBM? Maybe not. Atari never did much better at avertising their machines either from my recollection. And they had no intention of hiring the original Lorraine team, so the out come would have been vastly different for sure.
Plaz
Atari wanted to use the Amiga hardware to make a system that would basicly have been a "better ST"... AmigaOS would have gone, and some of the amiga's more osoteic features would have been forgotten... They wanted a 16bit games console nothing more
Atari's fate would not have changed. Imagine if Apple had bought the Amiga team... :idea:
Why did Atari make the Atari ST then? That wasn't a game console, was it? It was even released before the Amiga IIRC.
The ST was a response to the Macintosh and the Amiga (ie the computer rather than the games machine), the ST had a quicker time to market because it was a much simpler machine than the Amiga.
Anyway what makes you think that the Amiga team wouldn't be able to convince Atari to use AmigaOS? It was far better than GEM OS.
If you read the Atari-Amiga agreement (it is available if you google it)... it shows clearly that Atari want to use parts of the Amiga technology (ie the stuff which Amiga had patents on, like DMA, blitters etc...). Atari did not want the Chips or the OS, they just wanted the technology for their own machines without having to licence the patents.
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Plaz wrote:
Atari never did much better at avertising their machines either from my recollection.
I believe they did actually. How else would they be able to sell so many Atari STs, when that computer was inferior to the Amiga?
Besides, the Atari ST had a much better design than the Amiga, which would also be a selling point. The name "Amiga" was never a marketable name IMHO. And everyone knew what an "Atari" was, but what was an "Amiga"?
Some of the last computers Atari made was far better than the Amiga (except for the OS of course.) Atari Falcon, for example.
All in all, I believe Amiga would have been better hands with Atari.
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plasma wrote:
Some of the last computers Atari made was far better than the Amiga (except for the OS of course.) Atari Falcon, for example.
The Arati falcon was vastly superior to the Amiga, in terms of hardware. But the Falcon was a response to the Amiga as a complete unit. Especially with MiNT rather than GEM.
All in all, I believe Amiga would have been better hands with Atari.
The Amiga would never have been made if Atari had got their hands on the technology. Atari would still have died in the 90s... All the great computer companies of the 80's died in the 90s.
Commodore
Atari
Apple
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bloodline wrote:
Anyway what makes you think that the Amiga team wouldn't be able to convince Atari to use AmigaOS? It was far better than GEM OS.
If you read the Atari-Amiga agreement (it is available if you google it)... it shows clearly that Atari want to use parts of the Amiga technology (ie the stuff which Amiga had patents on, like DMA, blitters etc...). Atari did not want the Chips or the OS, they just wanted the technology for their own machines without having to licence the patents.
Apparently they had plans to, at least, use parts of AmigaOS in their Atari 1850XLD.
From http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/1850xld.html
One ex-Atari Corp. also discovered proposals for a Unix-style GUI kernel for the "Mickey" project. How much of this was the original AmigaOS system is unknown but it is likely that it contained information on the Amiga EXEC and Intuition, with some kind of custom "AtariDOS" additions.
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You speak as if Commodore was a competant company!!! Don't forget that none of the sections communicated, they were all in competition for budgets... I think dave pointed out that no one in the Amiga teams even knew of the CDTV until it was ready for market... And of the Teams which were working on Amiga systems, even they didn't know what each other was doing. It was just like Apple before they got Jobs back in, All the 80's computer companies died in the 90's... Only apple survived because Jobs is an arrogant MoFo. I doubt if the Amiga teams knew much of the Commodore IBM-PC and vice versa...
Monday morning quarter backing, we some really horrific management skills of C=. What I am saying, atleast Gould and Ali (more Gould though) actually made millions of dollars before they blew it entirely. If Billed&Fleeced made millions by selling millions of units then lost it all, it would be on thing. They never got to that phase, they just borrowed and blew it all with nothing of significance to show for it. That is what I am talking about.
Dammy
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raddude9:
Amiga OS:
Took half a decade to get from 1.1 to 2.0
I don't think that was a big deal. Really, AmigaOS did its job quite well for the hardware at the time. AGA really stifled 3.x in a big way.
What about getting Windows from 9x to NT5? That transition was way, way overdue. What about MacOS? Even after every Mac had a PPC, Apple still didn't put much effort into modernizing the OS with real memory protection ("Macs don't crash"), and in the end, they effectively scrapped it and started over with someone else's OS. It took Linux about a decade before people started taking it seriously, and it still has market share in the single digits.
Bloodline: Atari's fate would not have changed. Imagine if Apple had bought the Amiga team...
Didn't Steve Jobs scoff at Lorraine, saying it "had too much hardware?"
Apple has too long a history of packaging mediocre hardware in fancy boxes.
Dammy: IIRC, Haynie stated about the time that of C='s death was the time the x86 was really picking up steam. I will point out that is when he decided against Zorro IV and was going to go with PCI. C= guessed the the big market was indeed x86, they just botched it with the 486 speed increase issues.
It would've been interesting to see what would have come of PPC if both Amiga and Apple were using the chip. If anything, haveing more "real" computers use it would have helped one of PPC's major drawbacks: sucky legacy support. In its early days, MacOS was hardly robust enough to use PPC to its fullest potential.
Coldfish: The A500's poor upgradability didnt help.
Arguable, seeing how well Apple has done. I find it sad that you need to spend at least $1,200 on a Mac just to get one expansion slot. Even an A1200 is more expandable than an iMac.
Bloodline: Only apple survived because Jobs is an arrogant MoFo.
Sorry, it's totally obvious, but it pleases me to hear at least one other person say it. :-)
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i think if when atari lost amiga to commodore they both agreed to produce amiga compatible machines both companies coupld have been alive today.
atari could have taken the wedge/low end machines and commodore the box/high end ones.
instead when atari lost amiga they rushed to slap together a machine and the companies competed alone against each other and apple and the x86 world.
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they both agreed to produce amiga compatible machines both companies coupld have been alive today (Atari/Commodore)
Now that would have made some kind of sense to me too. The combined resources could have been formitable. But reading the history of the companies and players, egos would have never allowed it to happen. If the proper management and foresight existed at each company, think of the possibilities. It is a great "what if".
Plaz
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Waccoon:
Coldfish: The A500's poor upgradability didnt help.
Arguable, seeing how well Apple has done. I find it sad that you need to spend at least $1,200 on a Mac just to get one expansion slot. Even an A1200 is more expandable than an iMac.
Agreed more or less, however a vanilla iMac is arguably a more useful machine by todays standards compared to the A1200. Apple have always been criticised over poor upgradability but they constantly refresh their product lines, so it probably makes up for it?
When AGA hit the scene the A500 was really showing its age, and the few upgrades that existed were poor value, I remember a supra? HD add-on retailing for about the same price as a complete 486 system, and the A570 CD drive offered little if any CD-only software, making it virtually redundant.
Anyway, its probably hindsight that has me seeing upgradeability as an issue, after selling my A500 and A1200, since then, Ive been spoilt by cheap and plentyful upgrades on PC.
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IMHO I think the Amiga was always doomed when taken over by Commodore. The A500 and A2000 were only modifications on the theme that was the A1000 ('85). The 500 and 2000 were still being marketed by Commodore up until '92. 7 years of longevity is an indication of the durability and groundbreaking technology that was the Amiga. It was also an inditement of the lack of ingenuity and initiative at CBM. Simply put, I believe they rode the Amiga into the ground. The A3000 was a further modification on the theme and a great step forward, but way too expensive for most users at the time it was released and it had some design limitations that retarded its capabilities. When the A1200 and A4000 were released it was too late, the damage was done and Commodore was too far in debt to survive. Don’t get me wrong the A1200 and A4000 were great machines but their technology was nowhere near as ground breaking, as the A1000 was when it was released. If you read the Amiga Mag articles at the time of the A1200 and A4000s release, the reviewers were asking;
Where’s the 16bit sound.?
Why only a 14mhz ‘020 in the 1200?
Why no 24bit video?
These sort of questions were never asked about the A1000 as there was no comparative technology at the time.
1. Commodore rode on the Amiga technology for far too long.
:getmad:
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Quote:
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What is Amiga's worst move today?
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Amiga Inc. and Genesi not working past their problems and bad blood with each other for Hyperion to make OS4 for available hardware.
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You speak as if Commodore was a competant company!!! Don't forget that none of the sections communicated, they were all in competition for budgets... I think dave pointed out that no one in the Amiga teams even knew of the CDTV until it was ready for market... And of the Teams which were working on Amiga systems, even they didn't know what each other was doing. It was just like Apple before they got Jobs back in, All the 80's computer companies died in the 90's... Only apple survived because Jobs is an arrogant MoFo. I doubt if the Amiga teams knew much of the Commodore IBM-PC and vice versa...
Apple had what, 8 Billion in the bank. That's a crap load of liquid capital just sitting there, that's more then enough to keep creditors happy even with crap sales for years.
As for your accurate description of C='s stupidity, now compare that to Billed&Fleeced Show. Which one had a real company they rain aground and which one was a .com scheme they suckered folks into? Now you see why I can honestly say, I rather have C='s management since they built a company on sales, and then lost it because of their incompetence vs .com scheme?
Dammy
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CDTV:
A disaster in every way, overpriced obsolete hardware and unfocused marketing which not only detracted people from buying the thing
That sounds hell of a lot like the Amigaone.
Amiga Inc. and Genesi not working past their problems and bad blood with each other for Hyperion to make OS4 for available hardware.
Remember the TRIO (Amiga Inc,Hyperion,Eyetech) decided it would be best to start their own little monopoly, alienating every outsider who was interested in OS4 on other hardware. They are the only people responsible for the mess OS4 is in now.
Genesi is not to blame for Hyperions own stupidity.
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I think te worst move was to ignore the sheaper hardware that was put out by Mac and pc vendors. Amiga shuld of implemented pci and things like that earlier.
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My 2 cents..
Marketing between 87-90 was a big reason the Amiga failed. Commodore should have gotten the Amiga into the large electronics chains like Best Buy. I know they had the A500 in Sears, but the A2000/A2500 and A3000 (the professional models) could have used the exposure. I think those machines would have done well sitting next to Turbo XT's and 286's.
The Amiga dealer situation was also pretty crappy here in the states. In Minnesota, the only place you could get an A2000/A3000 was at a commodore dealer. The dealers here did not offer a level of professionalism that could be found in the PC market. I remember one "dealer" who literally had his store in a garage and the store was called Protecto. Why would I buy a $1500 machine from a company called Protecto that was located in a garage? Of course at the Commodore dealer, you didn't have a PC sitting next to it as a comparison. The best selling point for any Amiga would have been having it setup next to a PC.
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raddude9 wrote:
Amiga OS:
Took half a decade to get from 1.1 to 2.0
That was hillarious and sad!!
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dammy wrote:
As for your accurate description of C='s stupidity, now compare that to Billed&Fleeced Show.
Yes, they suck :( ... but also they do not have all IP, and patents for Amiga. GateWay2k still has them, so it's bit 'tied-down' situation. Not exactly like Commodore...
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dammy wrote:
You speak as if Commodore was a competent company!!! Don't forget that none of the sections communicated, they were all in competition for budgets... I think Dave pointed out that no one in the Amiga teams even knew of the CDTV until it was ready for market... And of the Teams which were working on Amiga systems, even they didn't know what each other was doing. It was just like Apple before they got Jobs back in, All the 80's computer companies died in the 90's... Only apple survived because Jobs is an arrogant MoFo. I doubt if the Amiga teams knew much of the Commodore IBM-PC and vice versa...
Apple had what, 8 Billion in the bank. That's a crap load of liquid capital just sitting there, that's more then enough to keep creditors happy even with crap sales for years.
It's true they did have capital... but their computer lines were a mess. They had loads of different models with no real differentiation... The systems had little outward difference from a PC, with no clear market separation, with expensive under performing hardware... no valuable software assets (even then it was clear that hardware was no longer a real money spinner). Their operating system sucked and was years behind WindowsNT (and the *nix clones), even Win95 was better than MacOS of the mid to late nineties. Their R&D teams were stuck in a battle with each other and the management... there was no clear direction, and they were losing market share rapidly... There simply was no reason to buy a Mac.
When Jobs is brought back in, he gets rid of the Apple R&D and replaces it with his NeXT teams. He cancels all Macintosh lines, and replaces it with the iMac... a system that looked good, and had a distinctive form factor. The OS was prettied up, and the systems were sold as "Switch on and Go". All efforts are then spent developing the iTunes/iPod concept... with the Mac Lines being developed by his NeXT R&D into clearly separated consumer and professional lines, including the portable lines. Then he dumped the aging operating system and replaced it with his NeXT OS... if you look closely you will notice that Apple actually died... it was NeXT that survived, and it survived by arrogantly positioning itself as a "Luxury Brand"... Now Steve has manged to get rid of proprietary hardware, he's pushing back at getting some market... all this with a VERY strong Professional software range and the service oriented, iTunes + iPod to ensure a steady income...
As for your accurate description of C='s stupidity, now compare that to Billed&Fleeced Show. Which one had a real company they rain aground and which one was a .com scheme they suckered folks into? Now you see why I can honestly say, I rather have C='s management since they built a company on sales, and then lost it because of their incompetence vs .com scheme?
I refuse to discuss the Bill&Fleecy show because it was nothing more than a joke... The Amiga brand had one chance, the original Gateway idea using QNX kernel and a nice pretty custom front end (with a vaguely AmigaOS like API) a la MacOS X... ;-)
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Should have dumped Zorro and adopted PCI early. This would have completely solved the whole ECS, AGA, AAA, AAAAwhateverA dellima as there would have been an upgrade path.
Goofy A4000 case where no real CDrom could fit.
The A600 was a great concept, but should have either been called the A300 or A600 with AGA and 68020.
-Alex
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Well they couldn't use PCI because Intel released it's specification in June 1992, and first MB-s arrived in 1993. A bit too late for Amiga 4000 and 1200...
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Plaz wrote:
I'd say lack of advertising was a death wish for CBM. After owing a c64 for 3 years, living in the US, and being an avid reader of CBM centric magazines, I bought a C128 first quarter of 1986 not even knowing the A1000 exsisted. (6 months later I learned my mistake. Apparently advertising depended on where you lived. Some received it, but large parts of the world did not. And those markets that did see advertising, still saw a game machine instead of a serious business box. Lack of advertising and poor presentation in the advertising CBM did do were the largest mistakes in my mind. Execs at CBM had to be nuts. Sink millions in to development and production, but then keeping it all a secret hoping "word of mouth" would sell the system? Arrogance in the face of future giants Apple and MicroSoft.
Right Commodore launches were the worst, Commodore should have had more adversting for the Amgia even before the launch.
And from the "What If" files....
What if Amiga would have been absorbed in to Atari? If I recall the history correctly, Amiga owed Atari a large amount of money. If it was not payed back by the deadline, all assest would have belonged to Atari. At the last minute CBM stepped in and payed the bills and purchased Amiga. In the end Atari met a similar end to CBM, but would that history have been changed if they owned Amiga instead of CBM? Maybe not. Atari never did much better at avertising their machines either from my recollection. And they had no intention of hiring the original Lorraine team, so the out come would have been vastly different for sure.
Plaz
Only if Nolan Bushnell was running Atari but he left in 1978.
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Two words -> Gould and Ali
They were the end of Commodore....
I always wondered if someone didn't pay them mega bucks to kill the company. Lets see, who could have afforded to pay out $100,000,000 to kill the competition :idea:
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It's amazing to me that it's been so long people are blaming CBM here for going to technology that didnt exist.. VGA cards didn't really exist beyond 8-bits and there was no bit blitting in their drivers until Windows 95 hit the market in early 1996.. Believe me I know I had to help with creating an animation system that worked with off-screen buffering back then, and when the new cards and drivers came it stung us hard. PCI didn't exist back in those days and it was a while into the P2/P3 that it became popular.
If you had to go back to those days, you really didn't have a choice, the Amiga would still be king of graphics until probably christmas 1994. Mac's got color in 87 (prohibitive cost) but didn't see much improvement until around 1994 either.
You guys are blaming Commodore for something that was way beyond it's control, even with their bad marketing. The PC clones became a price-performance miracle and a technlogy that wasn't as good overran an entire market here. Do you remember playing Kings Quest in 4 color CGA or MCGA (16 colors).
Please guys tell me that you aren't blaming them for something that was beyond them. Everyone saw the Amiga's great graphics as being for "Games ONLY".. The problem I think with forwarding the Amiga into offices and productivity had more to do with the software library and the PRE-3.0 user interface. Remember it wasn't till 3.0 that even OUTLINE fonts showed up in the OS..
Companies with real productivity disappeared as the obsession with Amiga graphics widened. Companies like Gold Disk couldn't compete with smaller more savvy developers. Commodore sold the machine on the incredible games tha no one else could touch.
You can't blame it for not getting into the business market beyond the nitch of video, the apps just weren't as good and those that could compete didn't sell. There was room for one or two word processors in the market not five taking ad pot shots at each other in amiga world, and I ask you how many people actually bought the apps versus pirating them.
The Amiga market was responsible for it's own demise, everyone wanted cheap and free.. It was worse in the Atari Market where piracy is blamed for the company's downfall totally..
So if you wanna blame someone, blame yourself for when you didn't buy that title but got it from your friend at the user group or off some bbs. You made it unprofitable. Blame your neighbor who bought that not as good clone PC hardware because it was "SOO" cheap..
It wasn't just hardware sales here, how many word processors did you own and use? How many games did you buy vs everything else? Would you still use MS Word or Excel somewhere else because it was "better"..
Everyone should think about their folly and where the Amiga could be today, if people had really bought in the way the PC folks did into business.
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DonnyEMU wrote:
So if you wanna blame someone, blame yourself for when you didn't buy that title but got it from your friend at the user group or off some bbs. You made it unprofitable. Blame your neighbor who bought that not as good clone PC hardware because it was "SOO" cheap..
It wasn't just hardware sales here, how many word processors did you own and use? How many games did you buy vs everything else? Would you still use MS Word or Excel somewhere else because it was "better"..
Everyone should think about their folly and where the Amiga could be today, if people had really bought in the way the PC folks did into business.
The piracy thing again ? I doubt piracy harmed Amiga more than video-games or lack of office-type software.
Commodore mistake was simple: They were selling Amiga as "universal machine/gaming machine", and what can accountant do with it?
Bad blood with Atari made things just worst, instead making efforts to enter business market, lot of time was wasted on this stupidity. Apple did a great job back then forcing it's way to the professional musicians and DTP people not even trying to get into video-games market. All computer companies from 90's that based their business strategies on game market went down.
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"Windows 95 hit the market in early 1996...."
"The Amiga market was responsible for it's own demise, everyone wanted cheap and free.. It was worse in the Atari Market where piracy is blamed for the company's downfall totally.."
Actually it was all my fault...
Bill Gates.
PS: I'm sure I got it out in September 95
Melinda, when did we get 95 out ?
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You guys seem to forget that Apple was in really financial trouble about the same time as Commodore was in 1994 and would have ended up the same way if Steve Jobs with the help of Billy Boys money wasn't there.I don't know if Billy Boy or Microshaft still has shares in Apple.Merv
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I think it would have been nice if Commodore had licensed the chipset to some other manufacturers and Amiga clones had appeared. Commodore's designs weren't always perfect, their production capacity was not always up to task, and their hardware was not always cutting-edge. Plus, by the time the A3000 was out I think the engineers had realized that having a proprietary, non-upgradable chipset was only suitable for the low-cost systems like the A500 and A1200, and not the high end systems. (If you take an A3000 or A4000, and add a CPU card, GFX card, SCSI controller, etc. the motherboard begins to look like nothing but an overly-complicated backplane.) So why not surrender some control over the hardware and let other companies take a crack at it, while continuing to collect some license fees and develop the OS...