Amiga's Worst Move?

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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... ;-)