why the amiga had to die

[Will-i-am]

I'm watching this interview of Thomas Friedman on the Charlie Rose program on PBS and he's written this book called "The World is Flat". It discusses how globalization is creating this whole new world order kind of thing. He has ten points that 'flattened' the world, or leveled the playing field. The playing field is the world marketplace, including the producers, developers, workers and consumers. The idea is that things are changing and America , specifically the people who control America, is not ready. Actually the stuff he says just clicked so clearly.... I noticed the Fedex taking over certain kinds of services around the world, and the whole web thing... like when I can get more support for my dead computer by going on line here than standing with my phone at my ear hoping the service rep picks up his phone, and when he does he is working from a desk in Calcuttta. But as he talked about one point, the rise of Microsoft and Windows and how programs started being able to talk to one another.... and I flashed on how the Amiga could multitask, could run Windows on it's bridgecard, had Arexx so progs could 'talk' to one another... and I'm thinking that those jerks who had Amiga under their thumb might have figured out how this computer plus the internet might make the supreme power of America in the upcoming technical revolution uncontrollable. That is, it was being sold around the world and many people were using it, exchanging files and even software.... remember how Amigans were much more likely to trade programs? That's part of why so many companies bellied up when copies of their product just got duplicated and traded. (It seems to me that some of Nixon's men were involved in the BOD of Amiga and lord knows they were evil... )so I think they killed the machine because they feared what is happening right now. They thought the Amiga would make the world too accessible and the domination of the world by the American expertise would be impossible to maintain. Outsourcing, open sourcing, programs which can intergrate their functions, easy to use interface... the Amiga was just too damn friendly and powerful, it threatened their hold on power.
Maybe it's late and I'm tired, but I think I figured it out....

[Will-i-am]

Waccoon wrote:

the Amiga was just too damn friendly and powerful, it threatened their hold on power.

Not towards the end.  It took about seven years for Commodore to make the first "real" improvement to their chipset, and AGA was far short of a stellar performer.  Given how much faster the PC industry was improving, even back then, it's obvious that Commodore knew they had a good machine and felt no need to improve it.  They were simply lazy and greedy, and released too little too late.

That's sort of my point, or at least an example of how it happened. The 'why' of it all nags at me. If they were really greedy they should have sought to improve the beast. Lazy makes more sense, but still maybe just being incredibly stupid takes the wind out of the conspiracy concept. I mean after all, have you ever seen one of those Amiga commercials?? Holy Crap, having the Pointer Sisters exclaim that Stevie will help them with their Amiga while we can see that Stevie is playing a game on the machine? This is how we explain to the consumer why they should buy and use the Amiga? Look at the ads coming from PC manufacturers, compare the messages. PC users were told about the power of the machine, the ability to do real business type work... Commodore made a tiny effort to advertise and what they told about the Amiga was that the Pointer Sisters and B.B.King could play with a kid and have fun! If that wasn't pure stupidity then it was a deliberate effort to kill the Amiga. When I bought my first 2000 I discussed the thing with the local techie at work. At first he derided the "Gooie" as being something no true computer user would need. So I told him about the CLI. The following week he was crowing about his new installation of Windows 3.1. Then he asserted that there was no viable business software, so I showed him Wordperfect was running on my Miggy. Then he asserted that dBase and Lotus 1-2-3 wouldn't run on the Amiga, so I took some files home and loaded them into my database and spreadsheet program, proving the ability to cross-platform compute, even being able to read ms-dos disks. So everything the techie PC user wanted from a machine and more was available from my little 7.5 mhz 2000. Yet Commodore chose to reveal to him that pop singers and game players liked the Amiga. Fluke, or deliberate sabotage? YOU decide! Myself, I think it was a CIA cover business for laundrying drug monies.