Amiga's Worst Move?

[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.

[tonyvdb]

Plaz wrote:
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.
Plaz

You can say that again. My first Amiga was an A3000T with a Video Toaster 4000. Unbenounced to me Commodore had already anounced the release of the A4000D If I had known I would have saved up a bit more and bought it instead. I had not seen any advertizments for it. So I had to wait for two years before I could aford to upgrade to it.

[snowman040]

So I guess we can agree that Commodore management was Amiga's worst move ? :-) however those days are over, what about today ?

What is Amiga's worst move today?

[Matt_H]

What is Amiga's worst move today?

What isn't Amiga's worst move today? The only good thing about today's Amiga Inc is that the platform is already commercially dead, so they can't make it much worse.

[SHADES]

I'm just dissapointed that after all the blunders, many other companies after Commodore who took up the reigns and had the oppertunity to once again develop the platform in to a vaible alternative, have not learnt from Commodore's mistakes and have instead made just as many bad mistakes to keep the AMIGA where it is seen to be today.

I foten think how wonderful the world of computing and technolegy would be now had the AMIGA flourished and developed  today like the IBM clone PC has.

My one wish today is that somehow, the platform can be revisited and developed in to a new breed of computing. Cut away some of the limitations of todays computers and make a real "Peoples" computer once again.

[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...

IIRC, Haynie stated about the time that of C='s death was the time the x86 was really picking up steam. I will point out that is when he decided against Zorro IV and was going to go with PCI.  C= guessed the the big market was indeed x86, they just botched it with the 486 speed increase issues.

Playing Monday Morning Quarterback for a minute, what C= shoud have done was started to panic early about having massive stocks of PCs sitting in the warehouses and losing value by the day.  Had they paniced early and really hard, they may have thought that the only way to pass off 486s as viable and somewhat expensive boxes was to:

1. Port AOS to it.
2. Put Amiga gfx chipset onto a PCI card and bundle with #1.
3. Call it Amiga 5000 and roll on.

Dammy

[Plaz]

What is Amiga's worst move today?

Coupons? :-)  Oh wait, that still is a bit in the past.
Today, right now, the big mistake is still the old mistake. I fear OS4 will be released, hardware will be expensive and scarce and the only place you will know any thing about it is right here on the amiga sites. While Amiga goes with out advertising once again, Amiga Inc. is touting gambling games for your cell phone. (BTW, this is not a slap at Hyperion) This time it may be even more pathetic. At least in the past many knew the name commodore and there was some small advertising and word of mouth. This time who outside these sites knows Hyperion, Amiga Inc. ACK, Elbox and cares? I'll put $20US on a bet that no one has an advertising budget or even a pipe dream of a plan for a budget. And I don't count banner ads on Amiga sites. Go ahead make me happy prove me wrong and take my $20.

Plaz

[dammy]

What is Amiga's worst move today?

Amiga Inc's manage has failed to commit seppuku, to atone for their botched management actions and decisions.

What really is sad is that I can say with a stright face, I pine for the days of Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali.  The Billed&Fleeced Show has devolved into something so pathetic, they make Gould and Ali look competent and professional.


Dammy

[coldfish]

That C= persisted with OCS and ECS for so long has some positive benefits, the A500 had a very long and stable commercial life compared with other platforms.  

AGA was a mistake, being too little too late, most A500 owners (ie the commerially viable userbase) didnt make the jump to AGA machines and got left behind.  The A500's poor upgradability didnt help. AGA machine pricing and value take some blame too.

C= couldve managed the transition from O/ECS to AGA better by  focussing all their resources on the problem, advertising, consolidating product lines and trimming the fat, maybe?

But it was late in the day, and the Amiga had already lost face as a serious computer at a time when people started wanting serious (work) computers to do home accounts, word processing and not just play games.  

[Lando]

What is Amiga's worst move today?

Among a million other things, they could try fixing their website.

If you try to buy something from their online store, Firefox pops up a warning message saying that their security certificate expired in December 2005.

Assuming they actually want to sell anything, they might want to get it renewed - when you're just about to give your credit card number and personal details over the Internet, a big red warning box telling you the website isn't secure may put some people off.

[bloodline]

dammy wrote:

Bare in mind that in '90 to '92 it wasn't obvious that the x86 would be a viable alternative to other chips around...

IIRC, Haynie stated about the time that of C='s death was the time the x86 was really picking up steam. I will point out that is when he decided against Zorro IV and was going to go with PCI.  

PCI isn't x86... it was just developed by intel... The whole industry embraced it.

C= guessed the the big market was indeed x86, they just botched it with the 486 speed increase issues.

Playing Monday Morning Quarterback for a minute, what C= shoud have done was started to panic early about having massive stocks of PCs sitting in the warehouses and losing value by the day.  Had they paniced early and really hard, they may have thought that the only way to pass off 486s as viable and somewhat expensive boxes was to:

1. Port AOS to it.
2. Put Amiga gfx chipset onto a PCI card and bundle with #1.
3. Call it Amiga 5000 and roll on.

Dammy

You speak as if Commodore was a competant company!!! Don't forget that none of the sections communicated, they were all in competition for budgets... I think dave pointed out that no one in the Amiga teams even knew of the CDTV until it was ready for market... And of the Teams which were working on Amiga systems, even they didn't know what each other was doing. It was just like Apple before they got Jobs back in, All the 80's computer companies died in the 90's... Only apple survived because Jobs is an arrogant MoFo. I doubt if the Amiga teams knew much of the Commodore IBM-PC and vice versa...

[Turrican]

snowman040 wrote:
What is Amiga's worst move today?

Not investing on their own assets and the classics ecosystem. They would not have taken over the world but could have made lots of money.

Intent was a great technology but overpriced. They licence the SDK for several thounds dollars when at the same time SUN and Microsoft give Java and .Net for free.

[plasma]

bloodline wrote:

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:

Why did Atari make the Atari ST then? That wasn't a game console, was it? It was even released before the Amiga IIRC.

Anyway what makes you think that the Amiga team wouldn't be able to convince Atari to use AmigaOS? It was far better than GEM OS.

[bloodline]

plasma wrote:

bloodline wrote:

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:

Why did Atari make the Atari ST then? That wasn't a game console, was it? It was even released before the Amiga IIRC.

The ST was a response to the Macintosh and the Amiga (ie the computer rather than the games machine), the ST had a quicker time to market because it was a much simpler machine than the Amiga.

Anyway what makes you think that the Amiga team wouldn't be able to convince Atari to use AmigaOS? It was far better than GEM OS.

If you read the Atari-Amiga agreement (it is available if you google it)... it shows clearly that Atari want to use parts of the Amiga technology (ie the stuff which Amiga had patents on, like DMA, blitters etc...). Atari did not want the Chips or the OS, they just wanted the technology for their own machines without having to licence the patents.

[plasma]

Plaz wrote:
Atari never did much better at avertising their machines either from my recollection.

I believe they did actually. How else would they be able to sell so many Atari STs, when that computer was inferior to the Amiga?

Besides, the Atari ST had a much better design than the Amiga, which would also be a selling point. The name "Amiga" was never a marketable name IMHO. And everyone knew what an "Atari" was, but what was an "Amiga"?

Some of the last computers Atari made was far better than the Amiga (except for the OS of course.) Atari Falcon, for example.

All in all, I believe Amiga would have been better hands with Atari.

[bloodline]

plasma wrote:

Some of the last computers Atari made was far better than the Amiga (except for the OS of course.) Atari Falcon, for example.

The Arati falcon was vastly superior to the Amiga, in terms of hardware. But the Falcon was a response to the Amiga as a complete unit. Especially with MiNT rather than GEM.

All in all, I believe Amiga would have been better hands with Atari.

The Amiga would never have been made if Atari had got their hands on the technology. Atari would still have died in the 90s... All the great computer companies of the 80's died in the 90s.

Commodore
Atari
Apple