What would Commodore UK have done?

[ajlwalker]

By the time Commodore collapsed there was nothing left to do, the game was lost, momentum had gone to other players.  In hindsight there was a slim window where survival might have been possible.  The A1000 was a ground breaking product, a game changer, the 2000 built on that, but then Commodore fell flat.  OS revisions came too slowly, hardware improvements were slow.  Design flaws were not fixed.

What you have to remember is that part of the appeal of Amiga for a great many owners (particularly in the UK) was that you didn't have to keep upgrading to enjoy the great software.  They were used to the constant nature of the C64.

Amiga may not even have had the limited success it had if it had gone down the constant upgrade path.  They weren't using off the shelf parts so it would have been extremely expensive for the consumer to keep up.

[ajlwalker]

I actually hold Commodore UK in very high regard, they were probably the best maketing division of the whole of Commodore. I wouldn't be surprised if Commodore in one form or another would still be around if that deal had gone through. The Cartoon Classics, Desktop Dynamite, Epic, Weild Weird an Wicked and Critical Zone packs were thing we in mainland Europe were envious of!

I think it was the Batman pack that really shifted the A500 units in the UK.

At one time Amiga Format was the biggest selling male interest magazine in the UK.  It was pushing 300,000 magazines a month.

Commodore UK did seem to get something right.  Whether that would have continued is another matter.

[ajlwalker]

Back in the days C= UK was dwarfed by C= Germany, and the only reason why UK stayed afloat longer was because they still had huge stocks. Just like Petro's division of selling NOS A1200 was far more profitable than anything else during Gateway and Amino-Amiga.

Those guys running C= Germany ended up at Escom btw.

C= UK knew how to make alot of fuss, but they failed getting the money together for a serious bit, and buying C= would have been the cheap part of any Amiga-revival. Remember how much time effort and money Escom spent just to get the A1200 back into production and even that would have been dwarfed by the cost of actually developing an AAAA,Hombre, whatever chipset.

Bunch of megalomaniacs.

Far more interesting is what would have been if Samsung had gone through with their bid ....

So far as I understand it a lot of the C= A1200 and A600 were 3rd party manufactured in Irvine, Scotland.

I'm sure it would have been pretty simple and relatively cheap for that factory to resume production.

[ajlwalker]

I guess the question is, then, how was it that C= UK managed to get such a large stockpile? Or was it a normal-sized stockpile, but seemed large relative to the shortages happening in North America, and presumably elsewhere, just prior to the bankruptcy? My utterly baseless theory is that since they actually had an understanding of marketing and retail distribution, they had enough money flowing in to keep their parts suppliers financially appeased and were able to have a more regular production schedule (at the Scotland factory, maybe?). And I thought they were able to do this because they had the most operational/financial autonomy from West Chester out of any of the international divisions. Correct me if I'm wrong.



I think C= UK and Creative Equipment International (Commodore's US distributor) failed to realize with their bids that there would be external interest in what they believed to be an internal credit crisis. It seemed like they each had the money to pay off the creditors and stabilize the company, but didn't expect it to be acquired out from under them.

If I'm remembering correctly, Escom picked up a bunch of Commodore veterans as employees, but they didn't do much to leverage business expertise outside of Germany. I wonder if they had collaborated more with C= UK (or as someone else mentioned, C= Canada) they would have been able to get production going sooner/cheaper. That might be oversimplifying things, though, given the huge mess Mehdi Ali left behind.


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They were still a small player in the electronics market back then, were they not? I expect we would have seen something set-top-box-like, probably tied more to the chipset than the OS.

I believe Commodore UK were successful in obtaining residule stock from Commodore divisions around the world.  ie.  As they shut up shop the stock was forwarded/sold to Commodore UK.  I'm sure I read this in magazines during the time, but my memory could of course be playing tricks in me.

As for Samsung, I believe they were pretty massive even then, but mainly an East Asian presence.

[ajlwalker]

I never knew that they were made in Irvine.

I'm not 100% certain it was Irvine, but pretty sure it was one of the "new towns".  Some absolutely were manufactured in Scotland though, so the point stands.

Actually, the A600 page on wikipedia confirms that the A600 was manufactured in Irvine.  I'm sure I read it first on a thread on amiga.org though.