Just my $.02 worth:
1. Transformer/Sidecar: Commodore made big promises to an already doubtful press and industry about IBM compatibility and the Amiga. With Commodore's history of vaporware and products that didn't quite measure up, these two items -I feel- severely damaged their Amiga creditability.
Transformer was a great idea on paper but a horrible failure for real world use. Having a chart to calculate how many *TIMES* slower your application would run on Transformer (if it ran at all) in the manual combined with Transformer's cost was just a disaster...no, I'm sorry, it was embarrassing.
Sidecar wasn't a bad product or idea if it hadn't been born out of the abortion that Transformer turned out to be. "Significantly less than $1000.00", as quoted by Commodore but the final price? $999.99. Wow, my cup runneth over!
In the end, this damaged Commodore's lackluster reputation even more...
2. Herding Commodore 64 users to the promised land: It amazes me that Commodore had this built-in crowd of Commodore 64 (and 128) users that numbered in the *tens* of millions but did hardly anything to migrate this base to their next machine.
Even Apple went out of their way to migrate Apple II users to Macs with Apple II cards, disk drive plug-ins, emulators, and converter software.
By not doing anything to salvage their investment in Commodore, it gave them no reason not to look else where and else where they did...
3. Marketing: I know you've all heard this before but look at bad the 128k-single drive- Macintosh really was but they marketed it like it was the second coming. Commodore's marketing was terrible for a new product launch.
Even the Atari ST's marketing was outstanding compared to Commodore's.
Apple: "The computer for the rest of us."
Atari: "Power without the price."
Commodore: Ah, did they have a slogan?
4. Icons/Graphics: Apple (Steve Jobs) understood that you have to have icons, windows, and graphics that look nice. You may argue for or against how cute they look but people *DO* judge a book by its cover especially when they don't understand how a computer works.
Workbench 1.0 through Workbench 1.3.0 looked like a brain damaged third grader designed the icons. With no set standard you had companies creating icons from hell that took up half the screen while others created icons smaller than the mouse pointer. Who thought creating icons that were wider than they were taller looked good? Stevie Wonder? Ack!
Apple lucked into Susan Kare but Commodore should have grabbed Jim Sachs from the beginning and hired him to do icons/windows/boot screens/manuals.
Just MHO,
-P
