Amiga's Worst Move?

[tokyoracer]

I had a thought that maybe amiga could have been going on today, making computers if thay done more market research. I cant really deside what caused the company going bust as i thought id ask you guys for your view. So as title... What was Amiga's worst move?
Chris.

[balrogsoft]

I think that the worst move was when Commodore dismissed the original team of Amiga (Lorraine). These group of engineers made the a impressive machine... why to dismisse the team? this and a bad marketing from Commodore, and some wrong ways, like A600 with ECS and 68k, it would be better with AGA and 68020...

[3246251196]

did they have the ability to insert AGA and a 68k20 into the 600 then?

and if they did - would that have meant it would have been likely that the 1200 would have even been a greater machine you think?

[nadoom]

i think amigas future would have been alot different if commodore had really pushed the amiga into the professional arena, it was way more capable than the PC and Apple at the time, but commodore didnt capitalise on this.

Commodore should also have not deverted resources away from amiga R+D into making crappy PC's.

Amigas should have moved with the times, the A500 and A2000 were on the market way to long when you consider that Apple was using 68020s and 030, way before commodore decided to refresh the range.

[Oli_hd]

did they have the ability to insert AGA and a 68k20 into the 600 then?

Yep, the A600 was a late machine, the reason they made it a 68000 and ECS though was that a lot of people were still buying the A500 and A500+ when the A1200 was launched.
The A500 was expensive to make, the A600 was simply aimed to cut the cost of the A500 by making it smaller.

The A1200 was a good machine when it came out, they couldnt do much more, it was an A4000 in an A500 case and it filled that role 100%.

In answer to the original question the answer for a long time was that the PC side was making a massive loss, Amiga went down without loosing any money.
That said Im not sure its correct, it just doesnt feel righ does it?

I think its more a fact that Amiga didnt push people to upgrade and as much as people hate the PC for making people change their PC when they buy a new machine there is snobbery in saying "I have the best PC, its a AMD 64Bit Venice, etc"
The Amiga never had that, no computer before the PC needed the user to upgrade to play the new game.
When the A500 got old and out of date people didnt look for a new Amiga, they looked for a new computer, they either went for the playstation games console or a PC.

PS: Amiga was a brand, Commodore was the company.
PPS: Its just sad that Commodore UK's buyout of CBM didnt go ahead, they said they had the money to cover the dept and they could restart production there and then, then the liquidators turned around and said "no, your bankrupt too" and that was that, where did that money go? Commodore UK was big, how come the dept couldnt be sorted by selling the UK/German/ all the other Commodore buildings over sea's?

[billchase]

Is this a trick question?

C Snyder

[tonyvdb]

Amiga or should we just say Commodore, had aweful coustomer service particularly here in North Amarica. Most people were turned off by there service and that alone will kill a company. Over in the UK they wer better but they needed the north Amarican market to get enough market share to stay above water. That never happend as here the Amiga never got a good foothold. For some time (in the UK) in the late 80s early 90s the Amiga outsold the PC almost 2 to 1 only the Mac did better. Here they never really even showed up other than the A4000 with the Toaster and Flyer.

[Oli_hd]

Hi Tony

Didnt the retailers compensate? I mean I bought my CDTV from Calculus and when I had a fault I talked to them, not Commodore UK.

Commodore's only customer relations seemed to be at shows or placing adverts (large adverts right outside Sega saying "to be this good would take Sage ages")

[tonyvdb]

The retailers had there hands tied as they to had to deal with the burocracy. I new the guy here where I live that owned one of the Amiga Stores and he always said that it was not a good situation (this was before there were visable signs on Comodore having troubles).
The store owners did there best to help us coustomers with warrentee but it all depended on availability of parts and so forth.
Im happy with my setup but its a true shame Commodore wasent smarter in how they did things.

[Louis Dias]

umm, wasn't it there heavy investments in PC clones that caused the debt?

If they had just been happy selling 64's, 128's and Amigas, they would have been fine.

They had descent coders and could have slowly moved into the business market.

[chsedge]

well if you read Commodore history you'll realize it was a very little organization compared to the big ones in the league (ibm, apple, ....) the engineer section was small but they had a great success with the vic and c64. by the time of 1985 Commodore was already in financial trouble.

Consider that then Commodore bought Amiga project and spent an awful lot of money for it. Then it bring all the production in house which was a tremendous effort for the time (MOS was really pushed to its limit).

After all the Amiga didn't sold it much to let Commodore survive and don't blame Commmodore that much. It's really difficult to make a successful machine and 80's made a lot of disaster among companies, all had their problems. Commodore was only more fragile than others...

The main mistake for me is doing a game machine but pretending at the same time to be an office machine when the market was already taken by one or two standard. Placing a totally different standard (despite emulators, bridge boards) and lackness of compatible office software made Amiga out of the big league: IBM, MSDOS, and Apple set the standard which C= didn't follow.

Doing PCs seemed right at the time (everyone just did it, everyone) but maybe it was already unfocused as activity: what is your product AMIGA or the PCs?

[Matt_H]

My opinions on Commodore's greatest mistakes:

1. Cancelling the A3000+. This would have introduced AGA in mid 1991 instead of late 1992 and kept the Amiga's foot in the door during the rise of VGA.

2. Botching the deal with Sun to use the A3000UX as an OEM low-end Unix workstation. Should have been easy money.

3. Replacing the A500+ with the A600, which was designed to be the botton-of-the-line entry-level model to complement the A500.

And there are of course a gazillion others, but without these 3 I think they might have lasted longer.

[Marco]

For starters, the revovling-door managerial situation meant that no one with sufficient balls to save the company ever became CEO, this leads us to the root cause fairly quickly - Irving Gould. This man is basically Darth Vader and Satan's love-child; reading through the histories written about CBM it seems like he really wanted to kill the company.

Mehdi Ali and his Amiga Jr - man was that guy a real bar-steward.

AAA - was in development from '89 was it? Should have had EVERYTHING poured into that and got it to market around '91-'92 at the latest. AGA was never much more than a stopgap and a pathetic improvement over (O/E)CS given the movement in the Clone market at that time.

Constant rebranding of the same machine and selling it for nearly a decade? The A600 was meant to be the 300 - a cheaper replacement for the 500, like the C64C was to the C64, except it actually cost MORE to produce than the 500+ and offered no improvement in capability and screwed up any games that needed the numbpad. Not good for what was nothing more than a glorified games machine.

The 3000+ cancellation as has been said - though by that stage AAA should have already have been finished if CBM were to have survived.

The lack of any substantive money in R&D - ties in again with AAA.

The investment in the clone market - stepping on their own toes for very little profit - if any.

The continuation of the 8bit line - the C128(D(CR)) and C64C should never have been developed. After the debaclé of the TED series (C116/C16/+4/264/V364) they should have killed all 8bit development in favour of that 900 thingy they had in dev before the Amiga turned up. As for the C65 - doorstop anyone?

Speaking of the 900 - shouldn't have cancelled it. Server market is big, that thing could have really helped out CBM.

Basically with no one in charge, no one was really accountable for the devastating string of managerial disasters caused by Commodore simply having no direction.

As much as I hate to say it, they would have been better off with Tramiel.

P.S. Tramiel staying would of course have meant the Amiga never would have happened as it was his Atari that funded Amiga-Lorraine development since Atari had nothing of their own worth developing at the time.

[Magic-Merl]

I think the worst thing they did was spending more money on develoment than their sales allowed.  If only they had got the next chipset out the story would have been so much different but they spent copious amounts of money on R&D which kept them ahead for a while but demolished them financially.

[Unit21]

In my humble opinion there was no "worst move". It was a series of related moves that caused CBM to fall...

As many companies before and after them they had no real strategy for their products. I think this is mainly to do with bad leadership. Too many people have their say in the organization and you end up with competeing productlines and no real market-strategy.
Just look at their products: The Commodore 64 line and it's derivatives was kept going way too long. Just because the silly little machine made it to the Guiness Book Of Records they didn't have to keep it going for years after the world had switched to 32bits on most every computer-platform.
Then they had a PC (x86) based lineup. These computers weren't all bad compared to the competitors at the time, but as I recall they were not competitively priced.
The Amiga was never really branded - it was a games machine in Europe, a video workstation in the US. And Lord knows what else... It was never communicated to the world what the machine really was. Now we might see this as great because we know what the Amiga really IS, but to the average consumer a computer with no message or identity is just that....

And to top it all off, CBM had a server-lineup. Who knows what they intended with that one. They didn't want the Amiga to be a UNIX machine because it would confuse the buyers. They didn't want to "OEM" it to SUN for whatever reason... But they poured R&D-funding into the CBM 900 - again with no clue as to where they wanted to go with it. And that machine WAS a UNIX-based contraption.
Do you see what I'm getting at...?! :-?
Commodore was all over the place - and I have seen up close and personal what that does to a company!!

The Amiga, of course, suffered from all of this.

There was noone at CBM that was tough enough to kill the 8bit product-line and sell off the PC-lineup.
So the Amiga had to compete with it's mothercompany's own products - and trust me when I say, that is A LOT harder than having to compete with other products in the real world...

CBM should have focused solely on the Amiga.
They were just too small to compete with IBM and the other PC-monsters.
With focus on the Amiga-line they should have developed the machines identity within the market it targeted. Not try and have it compete with Nintendos, PCs, Macs and whatever.
Home computers, designer workstations, Video workstations - and maybe a relabeled UNIX-machine with a server line to hook it up to... Come to think of it, this is where the CBM 900 would fit neatly into the equation.
It would have been a great world today if companies ran Amigas at the business end, and CBM 900 derivatives in the server room. Mmmmmmmmmm....

If I only had the chance to run Commodore for a few years... But sadly I was only 12 years old in 1988, and I had no idea about how to run a business...  :-D