Don't kid yourself buddy. The Amiga was a success despite C=, not because of them. My vote goes to Gateway however, for getting my hopes up and then p*****g on them.
Getting your hopes up? Gateway was deep in the pockets of Microsoft - and I don't mean that in the usual foil hat way Amigoids tend to. I mean like every other box-mover, they were wholly committed to Microsoft. The Amiga IP didn't mean anything to them other than a possible hedge against MS (in the sense that GW was holding it up saying YOO-HOO, MICROSOFT, WE MIGHT DEVELOP OUR OWN MULTIMEDIA STUFF, WE ALREADY GOT THIS AMIGA THING, THAT'S PRETTY COOL, BETTER GIVE US A NICER DEAL). What, did you thing GW was going to break out the dies and tooling and start cranking out A1200s again?
In
Workbench 1.2 there's an easter egg from the Amiga programmers (not C= !) that you can find that says "We made Amiga, They ****ed it up". All the way back in 1.2. The Amiga folks knew the writing was on the wall in
1986.
And as pointed out elsewhere, if C= were somehow magically still alive after '94, it'd be NT4 for whatever weirdo CPU, but wearing a C=/Amiga badge. Savor that for a moment. Yes, truly, C= of old was the worst.
This may change with CUSA's doings, that remains to be seen. Honestly I don't think they'll wind up big enough to actually fail as spectacularly as C= did. The days of box-shifting are gone. The days of the desktop PC are numbered. The $20000 "professional workstation" market is over. Go ask SGI's engineers -
they all work at nVidia now. Desktop systems such as they are, are Windows powered. Period. Sorry, Mac users. Sorry, Linux geeks. That's just how it is. You can rant and rave that I just don't
belieeeeeeeve! but...that's how it is. Everyone had their chance, and there's no room at the table for a one, two, or three man operation putting together boxes and badges and reskinned Linux Mint builds together to take the computing world by storm.
So with that said, I don't think CUSA will be the "worst" Amiga trademark holder, simply by virtue of the fact they won't be able to fall as far as C= originally did, because they won't get up that high. Not with a bang, but a whimper.