quarkx wrote:
If you take a serious look at what Commodore had for partnerships at the time, You would have seen that HP was their biggest supporter,and had a agreement over Hombre to use in the HP low end workstations. If CBM could have stayed alive even just 2 more years,HP would have eventually bought them out or taken over. The Amiga would have probably be dropped from HP's consumer line, but evolved into HP's Work Station line, running NT and HP-Unix as OS's. I doubt that little more than the name would have survived to this day, with cost reduction measures dropping the Zorro slots in favor of ISA to PCI etc.
I agree 100%. CBM would eventually have merged with someone larger unless they happened to get as technologically lucky a 3rd time as they did when they acquired Amiga and M.O.S. at just the right moments. Even then, this new direction may not have been towards a newer/better PC. Remember how they wanted to control a share of the calculator market by buying M.O.S. but coincidentally found themselves on the verge of a strong position in the home computer market? With their position in the market they may have attempted to gain some video technology and lucked into buying (for example) an up and coming cell phone technology.
It's also possible that had they lived they would have found a way to leverage some of their existing patents and produced their revenue by leeching off the rest of the industry. That's how some companies operate today.
Given that all non-x86 consumer PC systems are now gone it's a fair bet that Commodore/Amiga would have merged and faded into a larger entity. Like quarkx above says - it would not be surprising to see a larger name use their brand marks in one or two lines of computers. Sort of like HP still uses Compaq's name today.
