If Tramiel bought Amiga?

[freqmax]

This made me wonder..

"From this point on the former Amiga Corporation was a division of Commodore. Over the next few years many employees felt Commodore's management proved to be as annoying as Atari's, and most of the team members left, were laid off or were fired."

If Tramiel had bought the Amiga Corporation, is it likely his management style would been more successful than that of Commodore. It of course would required that Tramiel had the finance to fund further development.
If the Amiga team were rushing to find alternative funding than that of Atari once they heard Tramiel were in negotiations to buy that company there ought to be a reason

There's a third path, what if Amiga found funds to make it on their own?, or would it needed the distribution and marketing network of Atari, Commodore etc?
(or maybe Jobs would have bought Amiga )

[Kesa]

i think if Jack was in control of Amiga it still would have fell behind the competition. Jack was all about "for the masses" which means he liked to get the computers out there as cheaply as possible. If you look at the C64 you can see a pattern. Sold a very large amount at a very low cost which meant Commodore made no profit. If Jack applied the same strategy to the Amiga it would never have made money so they wouldn't be able to do any R&D which was required at the time. Instead Jack would have preferred to use existing components off the shelf to save money. Which means no true innovation would occur. This strategy was OK for the era of the C64 but it would be a death sentence for the late 1980's and early 1990's. Commodore will still have gone bankrupt regardless of whether Jack was in charge or not.

[nicholas]

NextSTEP on the A3000 would have been amazing.

[Kesa]

NextSTEP on the A3000 would have been amazing.

Don't bore me with that NextSTEP crap. BeOS all the way!

[pwermonger]

A few things here. Tramiel buying Amiga alone would not have guaranteed anything. Success at Commodore for the early computers was in the vertical integration and Amiga had none of that. Commodore had built that up during the calculator wars so even with a buyout its likely Amiga would have been quickly looking for another buyout by a larger company with more money and capabilities.
 
On the second persons point, Commodore under Tramiel may have been 'for the masses' and targeted to sell lower cost to the consumer, but that did not translate to Commodore not making profit on the 64. They didnt make much profit per unit, but that translated to more units sold and more profit, especially as competitors left the market meaning less competition against the 64. Technology is littered with 'boutique' brands bought out by the sucesfull mass marketers. Alienware's buyout by Dell for instance. Here was a maker of high end, high margin performance PCs bought by one of the low end consumer PC makers who does not make much per unit, but sells boatloads more units than Alienware ever could.
 
No one thing could have made Amiga succeed and I think it would not have done as well had it been purchased by an indavidual than having been purchased by Commodore with its chip manufacturing and, at least in the beginning, other profitable products to help fund R&D.

[Duce]

A1200/A4000 were simply too little too late when they were released, IMO.  Things may have ended up a lot differently if AGA was scrapped in favor of AAA or another more competitive in the market offering.  When the internet took off, NIC's for Amiga's were still so prohibitively expensive compared to PC solutions, that didn't help any. Seeing Doom and Myst on the PC back then was a real game changer for me.

I remember those days very, very well.  I can still remember vividly how much it pained me to box up my '060/RTG machine for sale when I realize the ship was sinking.  Bought a Pentium 200mhz/Win 95 Acer Aspire with the cash from that, and I was Amiga free until I bought my SAM 440 when they first started shipping.  All these years later, and with several MS certs under my belt, I still find Windows kludgy and unintuitive compared to even WB 3.1, lol.

[runequester]

We'd be joking about the commodore jaguar instead.

[nicholas]

Don't bore me with that NextSTEP crap. BeOS all the way!

BeOS didn't exist back then.

[OlafS3]

Commodore made a lot of mistakes... they overpaid the topmanagement and underfunded R&D, had no real concept or vision and spoiled money in different markets (f.e. by producing PCs). And they made their final error, the Amiga 600 (which created a lot of losses after they announced the A1200).

[CritAnime]

I have to agree. We were still using our 500 and we were considering upgrading when the newer systems came out. However considering the price differences between the Amiga's and PC's at the time my family decided to go PC and we ended up buying a Packard Bell.

I don't think the CD32 helped very much either. And I do feel this the was straw that broke the camel's back.

[Kesa]

BeOS didn't exist back then.

Both NextSTEP and BeOS were around when Commodore went AGA so either one could have been used with the AGA chips. I choose BeOS.

[persia]

We'd all be using Amiga typewriters now.

[CritAnime]

We'd all be using Amiga typewriters now.

They would have been reliable at least lol.

[nicholas]

Both NextSTEP and BeOS were around when Commodore went AGA so either one could have been used with the AGA chips. I choose BeOS.

Next STEP was written for 68k hardware, BeOS for RISC. There is an unfinished port of Haiku to Aranym so you may get your wish eventually.

BeOS did not exist until well after CBM went bust and a decade after Tramiel wanted to buy Amiga.

[Reptile]

Hello as a follower of both Amiga and Atari machines I don't think that Tramiels presence would have made things any different.

He was getting on in years even in the mid-80s, and my understanding is that he later delegated much of his responsibilities to his sons, who I believe were the main culprits responsible for Ataris downfall in the computer market.


The Jaguar could have been more successful, but it should have shipped with a CD drive, but developers were deserting Atari.
In 1994, CD was well on the way to becoming the standard media for software. Certainly this was the case by the time the Sony PlayStation shipped the following year.

Commodore at least had the CD-drive, but the hardware was too behind the curve for a "next-gen" console, marketed as a 32-bit console with graphics comparable to the more successful 16-bit Sega Mega CD, and no FMV as standard.

This was a similar scenario with the A1200, 256 colours and 2 megabytes of memory were simply not enough when it was released - even if was sold at half the price of PC's of the time.

The Falcon was a superior machine in many ways to the A1200, [I won't go into detail as that will surely spark another debate] but by this time most developers had already flocked away from Atari to develop for Amiga and PC, and later PC only, the Amiga won the war.

If it was Tramiel in charge and we seen an A1200 but better specced with Blitter and so on, things might have changed slightly but I think the Amiga platform as a whole was doomed to last much further than 1997 no matter who was in charge*. Microsoft would have made sure of that, along with the imminent Apple resurgence.

*Amiga as a commercial high-street product.