It's amazing to me that it's been so long people are blaming CBM here for going to technology that didnt exist.. VGA cards didn't really exist beyond 8-bits and there was no bit blitting in their drivers until Windows 95 hit the market in early 1996.. Believe me I know I had to help with creating an animation system that worked with off-screen buffering back then, and when the new cards and drivers came it stung us hard. PCI didn't exist back in those days and it was a while into the P2/P3 that it became popular.
If you had to go back to those days, you really didn't have a choice, the Amiga would still be king of graphics until probably christmas 1994. Mac's got color in 87 (prohibitive cost) but didn't see much improvement until around 1994 either.
You guys are blaming Commodore for something that was way beyond it's control, even with their bad marketing. The PC clones became a price-performance miracle and a technlogy that wasn't as good overran an entire market here. Do you remember playing Kings Quest in 4 color CGA or MCGA (16 colors).
Please guys tell me that you aren't blaming them for something that was beyond them. Everyone saw the Amiga's great graphics as being for "Games ONLY".. The problem I think with forwarding the Amiga into offices and productivity had more to do with the software library and the PRE-3.0 user interface. Remember it wasn't till 3.0 that even OUTLINE fonts showed up in the OS..
Companies with real productivity disappeared as the obsession with Amiga graphics widened. Companies like Gold Disk couldn't compete with smaller more savvy developers. Commodore sold the machine on the incredible games tha no one else could touch.
You can't blame it for not getting into the business market beyond the nitch of video, the apps just weren't as good and those that could compete didn't sell. There was room for one or two word processors in the market not five taking ad pot shots at each other in amiga world, and I ask you how many people actually bought the apps versus pirating them.
The Amiga market was responsible for it's own demise, everyone wanted cheap and free.. It was worse in the Atari Market where piracy is blamed for the company's downfall totally..
So if you wanna blame someone, blame yourself for when you didn't buy that title but got it from your friend at the user group or off some bbs. You made it unprofitable. Blame your neighbor who bought that not as good clone PC hardware because it was "SOO" cheap..
It wasn't just hardware sales here, how many word processors did you own and use? How many games did you buy vs everything else? Would you still use MS Word or Excel somewhere else because it was "better"..
Everyone should think about their folly and where the Amiga could be today, if people had really bought in the way the PC folks did into business.
