Here's what it WASN'T:
1. Advertising. I have a drawer full of old Amiga ads in Time, Newsweek, National Geographic... No, they didn't do much T.V., and maybe their "Computer For The Creative Mind" campaign wasn't as effective as it could have been (I liked it. Bought my first Amiga because of it), but the advertising was there.
2. Software. Wanna see my 1990's catalogues of Amiga software from all of the old, defunct Amiga retailers? LOTS of games, many of which sold Amigas to PC owners, Digita and Final Writer both had office suites which were competative at the time. Great stuff at reasonable prices.
3. The 1200 and CD32. Both machines sold out the roof, but debts had already done Amiga in by the time the CD32 hit stores. Interestingly, the amount of software produced for the CD32 surprized a lot of people in the computer and console game world. They thought that developers had long ago lost interest in the Amiga. Wonder if that's still true?
Here's the story, short and sweet: The worst case of corporate incompetence in history. Even before Ali, Commodore had a revolving door of managers who basically undid the work of their predisessors to start their own, soon to be aborted ideas. And Ali could have been the model for the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert.
That's it. PC clones? Non-issue. Microsoft survived the IBM PCjr., and Commodores error here was a calculated risk. They lost, but they could have bounced back from it. Piracy? Yeah, big hurt. But the end was management, that's really the whole story.
