If Tramiel bought Amiga?

[Kesa]

i think if Jack was in control of Amiga it still would have fell behind the competition. Jack was all about "for the masses" which means he liked to get the computers out there as cheaply as possible. If you look at the C64 you can see a pattern. Sold a very large amount at a very low cost which meant Commodore made no profit. If Jack applied the same strategy to the Amiga it would never have made money so they wouldn't be able to do any R&D which was required at the time. Instead Jack would have preferred to use existing components off the shelf to save money. Which means no true innovation would occur. This strategy was OK for the era of the C64 but it would be a death sentence for the late 1980's and early 1990's. Commodore will still have gone bankrupt regardless of whether Jack was in charge or not.

[Kesa]

NextSTEP on the A3000 would have been amazing.

Don't bore me with that NextSTEP crap. BeOS all the way!

[Kesa]

BeOS didn't exist back then.

Both NextSTEP and BeOS were around when Commodore went AGA so either one could have been used with the AGA chips. I choose BeOS.

[Kesa]

What about the third path, where Amiga had gotten capital to develop the system on its own?

The system as it were would certainly not managed after 1997, but I count on that with proper development there would been a replacement in the same spirit but different hardware.

HiToro was good at inventing technology. It was not so good at upgrading it though. Jay Miner would have struggled to update the already existing technology which is probably why he never worked for commodore fulltime. His talents lied with inventing and not upgrading. An example of this is the pacemaker he made in the early 1990's. Dave Haynie on the otherhand was good at upgrading existing technology but i am quick to point out he worked for commodore and would never have been given the chance to work for Amiga without commodores ownership.

Bottomline. Hitoro (or is that Jay Miner?) was great at inventing but not so good with upgrading. Taking this into account I'm not sure what Hitoro would have done different if they had full control of their own company with lots of capital.

[Kesa]

I think by vertical integration he is referring to the Amiga being locked into its own technology. All the single components of the machine are tied into each other and cannot be separated which means if you wanted to update the machine you had to redesign and rebuild the entire machine and not single parts only which is very expense. I guess the IBM PC would have been horizontal meaning that every part of the machine was a separate entity and could be upgraded more easily.

At least this is what i think is vertical/horizontal integration so don't quote me on this  

[Kesa]

Then laptops would be an example of vertical integration?, guess it saves costs per unit in volume. But cost when upgrade is needed.

Not sure. I thought i knew what it was until i looked it up on wiki. Maybe he should explain what he meant as it could mean anything...

As i understand it laptops wouldn't be an example of vertical integration because the components they use are generic and come from various different sources whereas the Amiga was vertical as the hardware was custom so came from the same company.

[Kesa]

wrong

OK then, explain it to me.

[Kesa]

Speaking of the ranger what kind of incompatibilities could we have expected?