Failure of Amiga predicted in 1985 on Computer Chronicles

[orb85750]

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=CzduHJvxMUc

Here (go to around 3:20), George Morrow predicts that both the Amiga and the Atari ST will never really get off the ground.  The guy is not exactly a prophet!  LOL.

[KimmoK]

Well... Amiga went to mainstream but then dropped off.

So he was right only about Atari ST ?

[alexh]

You have to remember this is a commercial software show. (Databases, spreadsheets, word processing etc.)

He predicted that Windows and MacOS would remain the two dominant OS's and software companies would not support either AmigaOS or TOS and he was 100% right.

[ChuckT]

I think it was .info magazine that made fun of the Wall Street Journal for predicting Commodore would go out of business.

[Crom00]

There was a concerted effort to move folks away from the insanely popular Commodore 64. Commodore had it MADE. For example every mass retailer stocked the C64 and it's expensive amenities ($169 1541 Disk Drive?... in 1980's dollars...).

Their biggest mistake was not having a drop in replacement or "refresh item" or software compatible viable sucessor to the C=64 line. They would have needed more power at the same price, with full compatibility and scalability in terms of software.

The PC had this plus the precieved value. Meanwhile Commodore tried to capture the high end market. I remember teachers and casual consumers were like... "WHAT? That's a commodore, I ain't payin $600 for that" This was what i witnessed in 1987 when one person saw the A500 at software etc. They were amazed at the sound and graphics but they wanted another $150 Commodore.

YET... the same types were cool with buying a horiffic tandy pc clone at Radio Shack, after all it was a PC, I could bring home (free software) from work and school.(rolls eyes).

As painfull to type now as it was to watch back then.

Fast foward to today. Who do we have in the modern mass retail market that had it made only to be in trouble today?

Sony. They had the market leader at a good price point. What did they do? REFRESH with a high priced item that consumers were no prepared for.

Got to hand it to Apple, they overcharge...since the start..that's their story and they're stickin to it. Once you release a low cost item and want to upsell consumers on a higher priced items, well it's always a challenge.

[JimS]

The problem the Amiga faces today *IS* the mass market. It was only getting started back when the Amiga was new. There's no was a non-pc player could enter that market now. AI would be best served if they settled for the niche market of hobbyists and nostalgic 80's bit jockies.

[orb85750]

alexh wrote:
You have to remember this is a commercial software show. (Databases, spreadsheets, word processing etc.)

He predicted that Windows and MacOS would remain the two dominant OS's and software companies would not support either AmigaOS or TOS and he was 100% right.

No, watch again.  He predicted that Amiga would never get off the ground.  Turns out that Amiga did very well -- and for some very serious non-gamer stuff (e.g. video).  He was 100% wrong about the Amiga.

[Matt_H]

The guy on the show was right for the wrong reasons. Remember that it was recorded in the pre-A500/A2000 days, so the Amiga was less accessible in terms of price for home users and not yet fully suitable for business purposes.

WordPerfect, industry standard at the time, made it to the Amiga, and I seem to recall rumors in some of the American Amiga mags that MSWord(!) was under consideration for an Amiga port.

Users and developers responded. The Amiga absolutely got off the ground, but (mis)management brought it down.

[Lockon_15]

I fully agree with Matt.
Amiga took off, but crash landed due nav error.

From business case standpoint, management made 2 cardinal errors which doomed the Amiga, one is all-known resource relocation to PC clones which instantly depleted enormous time and technology lead Amiga had at the decade switch and the other one goes to the fact company failed to learn the lesson IBM provided earlier - Amiga clones were more exception than rule.

Clones ment volume, competitive price and mass popularity which made Microsoft getting home run at first place.

[weirdami]

software companies supported Amiga just fine until Commodore died

[Amiga_Nut]

They were probably talking about industry standard packages like Lotus 123, Wordperfect, Photoshop, Microsoft Office blah blah.

The problem is quite complex, but Apple is a total failure in the Desktop marketshare and so is Linux. You only really have one choice and that's x86 hardware running a Microsoft OS if you want games/creativity/productivity/multimedia/100% compatibility. I really hate that I just typed that but it's the truth...many websites only look right on IE and commercial games only exist for X86 PCs on MS operating Systems.

There isn't much you can do on a brand new Apple that you can't do on a PPC OS/4 machine really and that's why IMO Apple has failed.

The Amiga A1000 was so advanced and ahead of it's time as a complete package when it hit the streets Commodore really had no idea what to do with it (multimedia before it was even invented). Also PC using companies would never retrain staff for software or engineers for support in the millions needed to ever secure the Amiga a place here forever. So if the home computer from the future couldn't topple the IBM PC ethos what could, a crap dinosaur of a machine with slow painful evolution of hardware and software picking up the pieces of a battered Amiga ravaged by cheap and technically superior games consoles.

The battle was lost a long time ago...about the time that the A500/A2000 was shipped with identical chipsets and CPU as the 85 A1000. I have no passion for computing anymore....I use a machine that is capable of running packages I need to run for my business. That's it, I have no attachment to any computer you can buy today now and that's the saddest thing for all of us who lived the 'exciting times'