What would Commodore UK have done?

[runequester]

So when Commodore went bankrupt, the UK division tried to take things over but ultimately lacked the funds.
 
We know where Commodore as a whole were planning on taking the amiga, but do we have any ideas on what the UK guys might have done?
Has anyone from that division talked in interviews or similar?

[B00tDisk]

So when Commodore went bankrupt, the UK division tried to take things over but ultimately lacked the funds.
 
We know where Commodore as a whole were planning on taking the amiga, but do we have any ideas on what the UK guys might have done?
Has anyone from that division talked in interviews or similar?

Sweet FA.  Probably pumped out more 1200's and 600's, wound up like the Acorn.

[Matt_H]

David Pleasance and co. were a very smart bunch. CD32 was doing extremely well in the UK at the time of the bankruptcy. No doubt they would have leveraged that to continue production of the important product lines and keep West Chester engineering intact to finish AAA and designs beyond.

I give Escom a lot of credit for what they were able to accomplish (without them there'd be far fewer 4000Ts in the world and NOS supplies of 1200s would be long, long gone), but there was too much momentum lost regarding engineering. Even if the Walker had reached production I'm not sure it would have had enough power by the time it would have been available.

[persia]

By the time Commodore collapsed there was nothing left to do, the game was lost, momentum had gone to other players.  In hindsight there was a slim window where survival might have been possible.  The A1000 was a ground breaking product, a game changer, the 2000 built on that, but then Commodore fell flat.  OS revisions came too slowly, hardware improvements were slow.  Design flaws were not fixed.

[Kronos]

Back in the day I allways thought about Mr Pleasance the same way as I would later about Bill&Barry.

Lots of hot air, especially betweem their ears, but a big talent for (mis)leading the public.

[B00tDisk]

Back in the day I allways thought about Mr Pleasance the same way as I would later about Bill&Barry.

Lots of hot air, especially betweem their ears, but a big talent for (mis)leading the public.

Wasn't he one of the originators of "The future Amiga will be an Alpha running WinNT" bullshit?

[ajlwalker]

By the time Commodore collapsed there was nothing left to do, the game was lost, momentum had gone to other players.  In hindsight there was a slim window where survival might have been possible.  The A1000 was a ground breaking product, a game changer, the 2000 built on that, but then Commodore fell flat.  OS revisions came too slowly, hardware improvements were slow.  Design flaws were not fixed.

What you have to remember is that part of the appeal of Amiga for a great many owners (particularly in the UK) was that you didn't have to keep upgrading to enjoy the great software.  They were used to the constant nature of the C64.

Amiga may not even have had the limited success it had if it had gone down the constant upgrade path.  They weren't using off the shelf parts so it would have been extremely expensive for the consumer to keep up.

[NovaCoder]

I give Escom a lot of credit for what they were able to accomplish (without them there'd be far fewer 4000Ts in the world and NOS supplies of 1200s would be long, long gone), but there was too much momentum lost regarding engineering. Even if the Walker had reached production I'm not sure it would have had enough power by the time it would have been available.

Yep Escom did a 'good job' (far better than anyone else to-date), apparently they even thought about reviving the CD32 but their market research dept advised them it would be a waste of time due to the imminent arrival of a certain game changing console from Sony.

[lsmart]

By the time Commodore collapsed there was nothing left to do, the game was lost, momentum had gone to other players.

You haven´t seen Dave Haynies "Deathbed Vigil", have you? Commodore USA had a lot of smart guys till the last day. They had new products in the pipeline. Linux wasn´t ready for end users and Windows 3.11 didn´t run any important game.

If Commodore had announced a reasonaby fast, Internet-ready Amiga with dedicated 3D-hardware in 1995, they could have sold a lot of them in Europe. The PC had a lot of momentum, but they weren´t moving as fast as it looked on first sight. Apple was completely out of touch with reality those days. They sold boxes with PC-like specs for twice the price and called underpowered boxes "classic" to make up for their deficiencies.

So: offer new hardware that matches PC performance and sell them to a price that doesn´t look like Apple. Bundle some internet software and make it easy to use (ask AOL). Let the world know that you don´t just want to rip off current customers, but extend the market to new, young users and give them a platform they will continue to use in the new millenium. Unfortunately everyone thought there was more money to be made selling cheap PCs than to have your own R&D.

And maybe this was right, but: If making a small profit for 15 years by selling good Amigas is what you want, you shouldn`t look at the PC guys making 10 times as much now but are completely gone three years later.

[Flashlab]

Wasn't he one of the originators of "The future Amiga will be an Alpha running WinNT" bullshit?

He was. I still have the Amiga Format interview in which he states this. Glad that didn't happen; not that the rest of the history was all roses but Amiga turning into a Windows clone would have been really sad.

[Matt_H]

Back in the day I allways thought about Mr Pleasance the same way as I would later about Bill&Barry.

Lots of hot air, especially betweem their ears, but a big talent for (mis)leading the public.

The fact that Commodore UK had the business savvy to not only stay afloat, but be outright profitable in the face of otherwise total corporate collapse proves their competence to me.

Yep Escom did a 'good job' (far better than anyone else to-date), apparently they even thought about reviving the CD32 but their market research dept advised them it would be a waste of time due to the imminent arrival of a certain game changing console from Sony.

Yeah, that was probably a good choice. If they'd gotten it back on sale in early 1995 it might have stood a chance, but by early/mid 1996 when their other production lines got going again, it would have been an utter failure.

[psxphill]

Wasn't he one of the originators of "The future Amiga will be an Alpha running WinNT" bullshit?

Apart from it being HP PA-RISC and not DEC Alpha, the idea of Windows NT was probably thrown around more amongst the mangers than the engineers.
 
The Amiga got unix, so why not NT?
 
We'll never know what would have happened as Commodore ran out of Money. Even if they'd been allowed to sell CD32's & survived a bit longer, they wouldn't have been able to compete with Sony for games or with PC's for everything else.

[tokyoracer]

Just like anything else we do to companies, spend 90% of time on strike and then anything we do actually do, we make is a half arsed job of it.

[jj]

Your thinking of the french I think

[tokyoracer]

Your thinking of the french I think

No they just do a half arsed job all the time. Just got to look at my Escom 1200 for a fine example. :lol: