Amiga's Worst Move?

[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  

[Jose]

No investing enouph in AAA.

[Kinster]

mehdi ali

[Belial6]

The big blunder that I never hear stated was the huge mistake of insisting on SCSI for hard drives.  Towards the end of the line here in California, a A500 Cost $300.  A hard drive for that same machine was ~$500.  People didn't mind paying $300 for a hard drive when the computer cost $2000.  But when the computer cost $300, $500 is just too much.  The benefits of SCSI just didn't offer anything to most users.

This relegated Amiga to only using floppies, and thus limited the size of applications.  As programs got bigger, this became a real problem.  No one wanted to play a game that came on 10 disks if they couldn't install it to a hard drive.

[DaBest]

It was all my fault. I will take the blame. :-(

[Oli_hd]

The big blunder that I never hear stated was the huge mistake of insisting on SCSI for hard drives

Actually the A500 never had SCSI drives, that was kept for the professional Amiga's like the A2000, the A590 (Commodore's Amiga 500 harddrive) used the ST508(?, that real old standard PC's used before IDE) to keep it cheap, harddrives still cost to much though.

Even Commodore's A2000 SCSI cards had the ST508 port.. I dont know but even the A2500 may have came with an ST508.

So

Same goes for the later stuff, The A4000T had SCSI but the A1200 didnt, heck the A4000 didnt either.

That said Commodore didnt force the users to fit a harddrive until the A1200/A600 was out, which was way to late, it should have been a recommended upgrade for the A500+ and required in the A2000.

[Waccoon]

AGA was a horrific disappointment.  AAA was way late.  Commodore wasted too much time and money on projects nobody wanted.  That's about it.

I remember seeing the original A4000's when they were released, and the painfully slow screen refreshes in hi-res with only 16 colors.  I knew right then and there Commodore made no "real" improvements to the chipset, and they weren't going to make it (of course, I pre-ordered my A1200 anyway).

[CLS2086]

Hi,
for me it was C= Commercial system that was the real faillure...
Here, commercials sellers at C= sold to every big commercial center very huge amount of machines with nice discount and promised to take them back the unsold after 2/3 months at the full price... and with a nice bonus for the commercials...
This made a big loss of income.
Very few repair compagnies were allowed to repair C= machines, so there was lot of money spending in Shiping and handling ...
The Floppy drives were also a big loss of money, it was each time replaced and cost 1/3 of the final machine price, so no profit at all... and don't forget the technician time to pay ...  :-?

[dammy]

The worst possible move was having idiots run C= that didn't have a freaking clue or plan.  All they did was react to events.

Like any aircraft accident, there wasn't a single blunder, but a series of small blunders that acted like a domino effect that leads to a catastrophic accident.  C= should have had a premium customer service beyond a decent base customer service.  C= should have trusted their engineers and accept them as a full fledge member of management team.  C= failed to accept they needed a baseline nitch market (AV market), worked with AV companies in a unified developement push.  

C= failed to keep the Amiga current with x86 (486), they should have spent the money on porting AOS to x86 and setup and spun off a x86-AOS company with minimum cash drain plus turn a blind eye to piracy.  This is exactly what M$ for decades, whine about it and let piracy push M$ into ever office and home.  Let the tiny AOS/x86 company fail after maximum saturation and allow the clone OEM to license at a really cheap rate AOS.  Most of Amiga folks would never go to x86 back then so there is little worry about losing us to x86 sales.  

C= also failed to buy at discount rate, failed AOS software houses' IP.  Had C= started to spend minimum cash for the better titles, they could once again accessed cheap coding markets that were beginning in India.  Port the games and decent apps to x86 and offer it to the x86 OEMs for minimum money in addition to AOS allowing the OEM to resell it on CD as value added content.  Doing all the above for say a fifth of what M$ wanted would given C= a foothold in the markets across the board.

Dammy

[bloodline]

@dammy

Bare in mind that in '90 to '92 it wasn't obvious that the x86 would be a viable alternative to other chips around... the 68k was still strong... the PPC had just started to be pushed... there were MIPS and ARM... not to mention the PA-RISC and the Alpha....

Only by about 97/98 did the x86 start to pull ahead of all the competition.

[raddude9]

wow, like the other posters, they made too many bad moves to count, apart from all of the PC division problems and UNIX mistakes, some of my Amiga related highlights are:

AGA:
Too late to market, instead of overtaking the PC's of the day it barely caught up with them.

CDTV:
A disaster in every way, overpriced obsolete hardware and unfocused marketing which not only detracted people from buying the thing it confused people about what amigas were. Now if they could only have made a more powerful A1200 with a built in CDROM drive in a Walker type case (which I've always had a soft spot for :-) back in '91 I think they could have expanded their market instead of having it contract with newer machines.

Amiga OS:
Took half a decade to get from 1.1 to 2.0

[Plaz]

I'd say lack of advertising was a death wish for CBM. After owing a c64 for 3 years, living in the US, and being an avid reader of CBM centric magazines, I bought a C128 first quarter of 1986 not even knowing the A1000 exsisted. (6 months later I learned my mistake. Apparently advertising depended on where you lived. Some received it, but large parts of the world did not. And those markets that did see advertising, still saw a game machine instead of a serious business box. Lack of advertising and poor presentation in the advertising CBM did do were the largest mistakes in my mind. Execs at CBM had to be nuts. Sink millions in to development and production, but then keeping it all a secret hoping "word of mouth" would sell the system? Arrogance in the face of future giants Apple and MicroSoft.

And from the "What If" files....

What if Amiga would have been absorbed in to Atari? If I recall the history correctly, Amiga owed Atari a large amount of money. If it was not payed back by the deadline, all assest would have belonged to Atari. At the last minute CBM stepped in and payed the bills and purchased Amiga. In the end Atari met a similar end to CBM, but would that history have been changed if they owned Amiga instead of CBM? Maybe not. Atari never did much better at avertising their machines either from my recollection. And they had no intention of hiring the original Lorraine team, so the out come would have been vastly different for sure.

Plaz

[bloodline]

Plaz wrote:
And from the "What If" files....

What if Amiga would have been absorbed in to Atari? If I recall the history correctly, Amiga owed Atari a large amount of money. If it was not payed back by the deadline, all assest would have belonged to Atari. At the last minute CBM stepped in and payed the bills and purchased Amiga. In the end Atari met a similar end to CBM, but would that history have been changed if they owned Amiga instead of CBM? Maybe not. Atari never did much better at avertising their machines either from my recollection. And they had no intention of hiring the original Lorraine team, so the out come would have been vastly different for sure.

Plaz

Atari wanted to use the Amiga hardware to make a system that would basicly have been a "better ST"... AmigaOS would have gone, and some of the amiga's more osoteic features would have been forgotten... They wanted a 16bit games console nothing more

Atari's fate would not have changed. Imagine if Apple had bought the Amiga team... :idea:

[Tigger]

Not letting the Germans kill Fleecy when they had the chance.
    -Tig

[plasma]

The worst move in the history of Amiga was when they backed off from the deal with Atari. Why? Partly because Amiga would then never have gotten competition from the Atari ST, and partly because Atari was a more wellknown company than Commodore.

[bloodline]

plasma wrote:
The worst move in the history of Amiga was when they backed off from the deal with Atari. Why? Partly because Amiga would then never have gotten competition from the Atari ST, and partly because Atari was a more wellknown company than Commodore.

Did you totally miss my post or what? Atari would have failed just as they did, they would never have used the Amiga technology as a complete package, we would never have known the Amiga.