Top 3 worst ideas in Amiga history?

[tone007]

3: CDTV.

You've gotta admit the black CDTV keyboard is pretty awesome, though.

[yssing]

1) Putting Mehdi Ali in charge of operations

The rest have been mentioned.

I actually liked the CDTV alot.

[Colani1200]

1.) Putting effort into PC products (both with complete computers and Amiga addons / bridge boards) instead of focusing on the Amiga
2.) A600 expansion port with no CPU traces
3.) Putting Kickstart into ROM

[runequester]

1) Putting Mehdi Ali in charge of operations

The rest have been mentioned.

I actually liked the CDTV alot.

I think it was a good idea, but they'd propably have done better at focusing on just CD rom drives for regular amiga's and getting that idea mainstreamed.

[save2600]

1.) Putting effort into PC products (both with complete computers and Amiga addons / bridge boards) instead of focusing on the Amiga
2.) A600 expansion port with no CPU traces
3.) Putting Kickstart into ROM

...OMG! All excellent points and I totally agree. Especially the IBM clone business, which I always forget about. It would be interesting to hear from Amiga users from back in the day that actually had and used said Amiga/PC setups. I picked up a large haul of Amiga gear in the early 2000's and the guy did have a Mac emulation program with System, 6.02 in there. I think it also had the external Mac ROMS and drive dongle too if I am not mistaken. I have all the software bits, but not the hardware... I should give it a try some day. Looks like he used Quark with it. Never knew anyone that cared to run IBM stuff though.

And it will forever remain my opinion that Kickstart in ROM was a terrible idea. Sure, the machine boots a little faster with it in, but big deal. It's still pretty fast. Being able to truly change an OS without opening your computer is common sense 101 and true user friendliness IMO.

[odin]

1. Marketing
2. Marketing
3. Marketing

Although that might be summed up as C= executive staff.

[xisp]

1. ECS and AGA. The true OCS succesor was to be based on Ranger.
2. Confusing products: CDTV, A600, A500+.
3. Computer + keyboard in a single piece was no longer sensible in 1992.

[Tenacious]

My 2 cents:

1   The toy-like color scheme and preferences of OSes before 2.x.  The early Amigas were never taken seriously by business and corporate types the first 5 years of production.  Only the TI-99's color scheme was more toy-like and hideous.

2   The strange font system.  The Amiga, despite it's many strong points, is still not the best for producing documents and printing.

3   There should have been a networking solution built-in from the beginning.  Hindsight is 20/20.

4   Hard drive solutions, when they appeared, were too expensive.  Already said.

5   Paula should have been improved as early as possible to CD quality sound.  Also, already said.


People always mention the gaming ability or the multitasking (still excellent), or video output.  I still love the dynamic ram disk and RAD:.  The Amiga was the first comparitively inexpensive computer that could display photographic quality images in color.  The OS was beautifully engineered to be near "real-time" and extensible and it is still unique and relevant in 2010, at least to me.

[mikeymike]

I'll counter a few points I've seen - hard disks are now cheap, but they were expensive.  There were A600HDs and A1200HDs, but IIRC they were £150 more expensive in the UK.  Commodore's biggest failure was marketing, and marketing a hard disk should have been pretty easy.  They could have continued to sell non-HD versions but people would be so convinced to go for the HD version that the non-HD version ought to have become a rarety.  They should also have told developers say a year or two in advance that they intend to push HD Amigas strongly and they want developer support.

Whoever suggested 256-colour icons in WB3.1 should perhaps try running a 256-colour WB on a stock A1200.  IIRC it really is sluggish even on the lowest resolutions.

AGA was a big disappointment, agreed.  The successor to OCS/ECS should have given comparitively eye-popping graphics/animation and make people and developers want to upgrade to it.  Instead, users didn't see anything compelling about the A1200 and developers saw it as a safer bet to continue to develop for A500s.

I disagree about computer + keyboard all-in-ones - I think that they are potentially marketable even today, though upgradability is a big question.  However, manufacturers nowadays always seem to want to cram a PSU in there as well, which ends up being a wimpy one that dies in 2 years.

[warpdesign]

They should have made it much faster, flicker free and it should have "killed" the A500 so everone started buying AGA Amigas.

So true: you need a killing feature to make people upgrade. Upgrading is what keeps a company alive. Commodore was unable to do that, unlike Apple... People didn't want to upgrade.

[Karlos]

256-colour icons would be pointless in the extreme. There's no guarantee that their selection of 256 colours would be anything like the 256 colours the user has ended up getting as a consequence of their palette preferences and backdrop selection. You'd end up having to remap them anyway.

AGA was a dissapointment but I am not convinced it was entirely down to the chipset but the memory used. That A1200 clone that fit in a 5.25" CD bay (Index or Access something?) had significantly higher CPU -> chip ram bandwidth than any other AGA system. Maybe it was faster at blitting and filling too?

The thing that AGA lacked from the start was a proper chunky mode. There's almost no reason why you'd want to use 256 colour in a planar configuration. Chunky 8-bit screenmodes (including HAM8) would have been a hell of a lot more useful for gaming and art packages alike.

[lauri.lotvonen]

1. AGA - The resolution in games stays same as OCS/ECS, 256 colors just ain't enough.
2.Paula - Stayed the same from 1985 to 1994, although I still love the 8 bit sound of it.
3. The odd missing ram in A1200...

[tone007]

A couple of people have said networking should have been built in, I don't believe this is the case.  When Amigas were in their prime, most home users' idea of networking was a modem.  Ethernet wasn't much of a concern for home users (never mind that there were other standards competing,) and network adapters were available for businesses that may have needed them.  

However, networking was built in, at least for small scale home use, ParNET and whatever else you felt like doing via the serial port.  What other home computers of the time were shipping with (at the time) business class network adapters?

[Karlos]

There used to be a pretty cool networking solution that used an adapter on the floppy drive port. Not exactly a speed demon but IIRC it had very little CPU overhead as Paula did most of the work.

[MskoDestny]

3. Stayed with 68K.

Really? 68K was reasonably competitive to x86 during the time Commodore was around. Apple didn't move to PowerPC until 94. There were high end workstations on RISC architectures at the time, but those were largely competing for a different market than Commodore was in. The cost of an architecture switch would have been high and Commodore had made too many mistakes already to survive long enough to gain any benefit IMHO.

My top 3:
1. Not investing in the necessary R&D to stay ahead. When the A1000 was released in 1985, it was superior to the IBM compatibles and Macs that were available at the time. The A2000 had an edge over the Mac II in some respects (namely hardware acceleration), but had a much slower CPU. Later on, AGA was both too late and too limited to compete as others have already pointed out.

2. Trying to compete directly with the game consoles. A blitter makes sense for a personal computer, but the tile-based hardware common in game consoles of the time generally produced better results at lower cost. Combine this with the pricing advantages that charging developers licensing fees brings and this clearly wasn't going to work out. Further, the attempts solidified the perception that the Amiga was merely a gaming machine.

3. Not doing more to pursue "professional" markets. Apple survived because of their dominance in the desktop publishing market. The Amiga did well in video production, but that alone wasn't enough (I imagine desktop publishing was a much larger market at the time, lots of companies had internal art departments for print. I can't imagine too many did video production internally).

[Tenacious]

There used to be a pretty cool networking solution that used an adapter on the floppy drive port. Not exactly a speed demon but IIRC it had very little CPU overhead as Paula did most of the work.

I forgot about that.  IIRC it was able to link more than 2 Amigas, but was spendy everytime you wanted to add a node.  What was it called and has anyone seen them on the used market?