Amiga's Worst Move?

[bloodline]

dammy wrote:

You speak as if Commodore was a competent 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...

Apple had what, 8 Billion in the bank.  That's a crap load of liquid capital just sitting there, that's more then enough to keep creditors happy even with crap sales for years.

It's true they did have capital... but their computer lines were a mess. They had loads of different models with no real differentiation... The systems had little outward difference from a PC, with no clear market separation, with expensive under performing hardware... no valuable software assets (even then it was clear that hardware was no longer a real money spinner). Their operating system sucked and was years behind WindowsNT (and the *nix clones), even Win95 was better than MacOS of the mid to late nineties. Their R&D teams were stuck in a battle with each other and the management... there was no clear direction, and they were losing market share rapidly... There simply was no reason to buy a Mac.

When Jobs is brought back in, he gets rid of the Apple R&D and replaces it with his NeXT teams. He cancels all Macintosh lines, and replaces it with the iMac... a system that looked good, and had a distinctive form factor. The OS was prettied up, and the systems were sold as "Switch on and Go". All efforts are then spent developing the iTunes/iPod concept... with the Mac Lines being developed by his NeXT R&D into clearly separated consumer and professional lines, including the portable lines. Then he dumped the aging operating system and replaced it with his NeXT OS... if you look closely you will notice that Apple actually died... it was NeXT that survived, and it survived by arrogantly positioning itself as a "Luxury Brand"... Now Steve has manged to get rid of proprietary hardware, he's pushing back at getting some market... all this with a VERY strong Professional software range and the service oriented, iTunes + iPod to ensure a steady income...

As for your accurate description of C='s stupidity, now compare that to Billed&Fleeced Show.  Which one had a real company they rain aground and which one was a .com scheme they suckered folks into?  Now you see why I can honestly say, I rather have C='s management since they built a company on sales, and then lost it because of their incompetence vs .com scheme?

I refuse to discuss the Bill&Fleecy show because it was nothing more than a joke... The Amiga brand had one chance, the original Gateway idea using QNX kernel and a nice pretty custom front end (with a vaguely AmigaOS like API) a la MacOS X... ;-)

[alex]

Should have dumped Zorro and adopted PCI early.  This would have completely solved the whole ECS, AGA, AAA, AAAAwhateverA dellima as there would have been an upgrade path.

Goofy A4000 case where no real CDrom could fit.

The A600 was a great concept, but should have either been called the A300 or A600 with AGA and 68020.

-Alex

[snowman040]

Well they couldn't use PCI because Intel released it's specification in June 1992, and first MB-s arrived in 1993. A bit too late for Amiga 4000 and 1200...

[Psy]

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. 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.

Right Commodore launches were the worst, Commodore should have had more adversting for the Amgia even before the launch.

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

Only if Nolan Bushnell was running Atari but he left in 1978.

[motrucker]

Two words -> Gould and Ali
They were the end of Commodore....
I always wondered if someone didn't pay them mega bucks to kill the company. Lets see, who could have afforded to pay out $100,000,000 to kill the competition :idea:

[DonnyEMU]

It's amazing to me that it's been so long people are blaming CBM here for going to technology that didnt exist.. VGA cards didn't really exist beyond 8-bits and there was no bit blitting in their drivers until Windows 95 hit the market in early 1996.. Believe me I know I had to help with creating an animation system that worked with off-screen buffering back then, and when the new cards and drivers came it stung us hard. PCI didn't exist back in those days and it was a while into the P2/P3 that it became popular.

If you had to go back to those days, you really didn't have a choice, the Amiga would still be king of graphics until probably christmas 1994. Mac's got color in 87 (prohibitive cost) but didn't see much improvement until around 1994 either.

You guys are blaming Commodore for something that was way beyond it's control, even with their bad marketing. The PC clones became a price-performance miracle and a technlogy that wasn't as good overran an entire market here. Do you remember playing Kings Quest in 4 color CGA or MCGA (16 colors).

Please guys tell me that you aren't blaming them for something that was beyond them. Everyone saw the Amiga's great graphics as being for "Games ONLY".. The problem I think with forwarding the Amiga into offices and productivity had more to do with the software library and the PRE-3.0 user interface. Remember it wasn't till 3.0 that even OUTLINE fonts showed up in the OS..

Companies with real productivity disappeared as the obsession with Amiga graphics widened. Companies like Gold Disk couldn't compete with smaller more savvy developers. Commodore sold the machine on the incredible games tha no one else could touch.

You can't blame it for not getting into the business market beyond the nitch of video, the apps just weren't as good and those that could compete didn't sell. There was room for one or two word processors in the market not five taking ad pot shots at each other in amiga world, and I ask you how many people actually bought the apps versus pirating them.

The Amiga market was responsible for it's own demise, everyone wanted cheap and free.. It was worse in the Atari Market where piracy is blamed for the company's downfall totally..

So if you wanna blame someone, blame yourself for when you didn't buy that title but got it from your friend at the user group or off some bbs. You made it unprofitable. Blame your neighbor who bought that not as good clone PC hardware because it was "SOO" cheap..

It wasn't just hardware sales here, how many word processors did you own and use? How many games did you buy vs everything else? Would you still use MS Word or Excel somewhere else because it was "better"..

Everyone should think about their folly and where the Amiga could be today, if people had really bought in the way the PC folks did into business.

[snowman040]

DonnyEMU wrote:
So if you wanna blame someone, blame yourself for when you didn't buy that title but got it from your friend at the user group or off some bbs. You made it unprofitable. Blame your neighbor who bought that not as good clone PC hardware because it was "SOO" cheap..

It wasn't just hardware sales here, how many word processors did you own and use? How many games did you buy vs everything else? Would you still use MS Word or Excel somewhere else because it was "better"..

Everyone should think about their folly and where the Amiga could be today, if people had really bought in the way the PC folks did into business.

The piracy thing again ? I doubt piracy harmed Amiga more than video-games or lack of office-type software.

Commodore mistake was simple: They were selling Amiga as "universal machine/gaming machine", and what can accountant do with it?

Bad blood with Atari made things just worst, instead making efforts to enter business market, lot of time was wasted on this stupidity. Apple did a great job back then forcing it's way to the professional musicians and DTP people not even trying to get into video-games market. All computer companies from 90's that based their business strategies on game market went down.

[gertsy]

"Windows 95 hit the market in early 1996...."
"The Amiga market was responsible for it's own demise, everyone wanted cheap and free.. It was worse in the Atari Market where piracy is blamed for the company's downfall totally.."


Actually it was all my fault...

Bill Gates.
PS: I'm sure I got it out in September 95
   Melinda, when did we get 95 out ?

[amiga1084]

You guys seem to forget that Apple was in really financial trouble about the same time as Commodore was in 1994 and would have ended up the same way if Steve Jobs with the help of Billy Boys money wasn't there.I don't know if Billy Boy or Microshaft still has shares in Apple.Merv

[DamageX]

I think it would have been nice if Commodore had licensed the chipset to some other manufacturers and Amiga clones had appeared. Commodore's designs weren't always perfect, their production capacity was not always up to task, and their hardware was not always cutting-edge. Plus, by the time the A3000 was out I think the engineers had realized that having a proprietary, non-upgradable chipset was only suitable for the low-cost systems like the A500 and A1200, and not the high end systems. (If you take an A3000 or A4000, and add a CPU card, GFX card, SCSI controller, etc. the motherboard begins to look like nothing but an overly-complicated backplane.) So why not surrender some control over the hardware and let other companies take a crack at it, while continuing to collect some license fees and develop the OS...