Ooh, I love these ones.
Regardless of whether Commodore had survived or not, I think one thing's for certain - the PC was always going to become as big as it did. If Commodore hadn't folded, they probably would have realised that the future (at least the immediate future) lay not in custom hardware but in off-the-shelf hardware.
What they may have done was eventually drop the Amiga or perhaps license out its chipset to interested parties to generate revenue. Maybe we would have seen Amiga clones. Either way, we'd soon have seen the end of the custom Amigas we all knew and loved as it simply would not have been financially viable for Commodore (who weren't in a financially robust state anyway from the early 90's on) to keep designing and producing custom computers. Competing with the likes of NVIDIA and Voodoo would have required major spending. Where would this money have come from?
By 1993 Commodore were hemorrhaging cash. It was reported that if sales of the CD32 had been slightly better, the company may have been saved but for how long?
For anyone who has seen the excellent Deathbed Vigil Video by Dave Haynie, I think the newspaper cutting posted on one of the walls at the West Chester plant sums it all up: PC Giant Fails To Adapt.
Commodore failed to adapt like so many other companies. The fact that their hardware was streets ahead of the PC and Apple equivalents of the time wasn't enough. They couldn't cut it competitvely in what is possibly the most vicious, cut-throat industry there is.
Of course a lot of companies in similarly tight spots did adapt and pull through. But this required strong managament and a clear understanding of the computer market. Commodore (mis)management is something we're all sadly familar with.
