»

[Hattig]

Originally Posted by Haranguer

They didn't respect their product, and they didn't respect their customers. That's why they went bankrupt.

QFT.

The company was all over the place. The Plus4 and 16 were barking when they had a winning C64 design and they weren't as good. Even so, the C64 was a reliable money earner through the 80s.

I am sure that C= thought the A600 would be the C64 for the 90s, and that people would probably be buying them to connect to their TVs for a decade.

The A1200 and A4000 were two years too late. Even though an earlier release would have made the machines more expensive to buy, they would have been obvious upgrades for potential and current A500 owners - the A1200 especially at a couple of hundred dollars more.

E.g., 1990: £399 A500 (68k, 1MB), £599 "A1200" (A500 casing, '020 CPU, 2MB) - probably called the A700 or something.

And that's before we talk about the chipset debacle, and the issues with corruption that have been bought up in this thread.

[polyp2000]

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...966/lejos0e-20

Commodore (A Company On The Edge) Book ... AKA .. everything you wanted to know about commodore I finished it during my 2weeks holiday in the Med this year - highly recommend it!

[desiv]

Originally Posted by polyp2000

Commodore (A Company On The Edge) Book ... AKA .. everything you wanted to know about commodore

+1
I agree there, a great book.
The current revision doesn't have much on the Amiga (apparently the first edition had more?), but there is supposedly a follow up on the way that will cover the Amiga era..

Should be awesome!! :-)

desiv

[pwermonger]

Originally Posted by SamuraiCrow

There is poor management and then there is Commodore's very poor management:

• They didn't keep up with the production processes of their custom chips and discovered at the last minute that everybody else's custom chips were able to clock faster than theirs.
• When they found out that it was going to be expensive to produce custom chips at a competitive clock speed, instead of forking out the cash and resources to get it done, they diverted funds away from the Amiga division and started an MSDOS PC compatible division.
• They also delayed the introduction of the A1200 and A4000 until the A600 was ready and discovered that the A600 was a total flop anyway and should never have been introduced into the AGA lineup.

There's probably more reasons but those are the main ones.

I'm not entirely sure all the delay of the 1200 and 4000 was the 600. larger delay was the shelving of the 3000+ project which was the first machine being made with AGA chips and the DSP chip that ended up being taken out in the final products and used by Apple in their AV line of Macs.

Also not sure the MS-DOS machines diverted any funds. Those to my recolection were a project by Commodore Europe and once released sold very well over there due to the good name Commodore had. Since most develpment of Amiga was in the US I doubt this had much effect on anything other than more income into Commodore as a whole.

That Commodore sat on the same basic custom chips capabilities with just small tweaks from the release of the A1000 in '85 through the 600 in '92 is probably the biggest influence in the decline.

It could be said they lost a lot of direction and made a lot of bad decisions along the way that all served in the small parts to slow down the company to a crawl.

Abandoning the Pet line for the home business when the Vic-20 came out, which disconnected Commodore from Business computing for so long that even when Amiga came out no one considered Commodore seriously as a business machine.

Instead of keeping to the plan of a low cost Sinclair competition, the expanding of the C116 into the Plus/4 was a huge bungle and went from a machine that would sell ($50-75 for a color computer with chicklet keys compares favorably with a black and white computer with membrane keyboard that shuts off the display when software loads) to a machine priced the same as the C64 that no one wanted.

Never releasing the Commodore LCD whcih at the time would have easily been the best portable computer around (and vaulted Commodore back into businesses) and instead leaving that market to Tandy with the Model 100.

Not having a plan to position CDTV. It compared favorably with the CDi and already had a library of software available which should have been a clear advantage over Phillips.

Cost reducing the 500 into the more expensive to make 600. Commodore cost reduced the C64 and 128 so they should have known how to cost reduce something by then.

Bungling numerous attempts at deals with the Japanese.

Not accepting a deal with Sun to have them sell Amiga 300UX machines as low end Sun workstations only to later enter into a deal with Nettek to let them rebadge Amigas as Video Toasters.

Not releasing the CD32 sooner so its sales might have had an impact and the money might have helped keep Commodore solvent.

Also have to remember things are a lot different now. After sale of a computer the company didnt make much money at all on it besides some software they sold under their brand and the hardware enhancements they sold until a new model came out. There was no app store to make Commodore able to keep making a continual income once the computer was in the customers hands.

[OldB0y]

Originally Posted by motrucker

This is as close as any one has come in this thread. There were two crooks in charge of Commodore International Inc., by the names of Gould and Ali. They stole all of the company's cash assets, then drove it into the ground.
Look into the shareholder's meetings in the last year or so of Commodore's existence. Gould would call the meeting with almost no advance notice, in places like the Cayman islands (were no laws existed to stop this sort of corporate fraud). This will give you a quick and dirty idea of what went on.
How Gould and Ali managed to skirt the law, and not get arrested is amazing.
But, all this crap about poor aga, or chipsets, is just that - crap.
Commodore International was raped and pillaged, pure and simple.

This, plus the fact that the Gould and Ali stifled the engineering team wherever possible. Not investing in/canning AAA, and delaying AGA's release beyond any chance it had of competing with PC video cards etc.

[lsmart]

I think Commodores problem was that upper management really believed that they were better off selling PC-hardware developed by other companies under the powerful Commodore brand. They didn`t undestand that it was the technology what made Commodore successful.

The A600, 264 and CDTV where great, but they didn`t get the money and attention to bring them to the market fast, complete and with the right advertizing and software, because the money was wasted elsewhere.

[Digiman]

Comes down to one thing...the C64GS, or what they should have done with the C64 more precisely. Had they used the talented MOS Technology engineers to create a portable C64 with an option for a monochrome or colour machine to purchase in shops around 1990 they would be alive and well right now trust me.

Gameboy is a disgusting screened machine, sound is tinny even with £100 headphones used with it so pure dirt, graphics are not much better compared to C64 games (play Power Drift on C64 and compare it to the NES crap that looks like Pole Position on a VIC-20 FFS)

And yet if Nintendo could sell such a horrid machine with a screen that makes the games UNPLAYABLE due to vomit inducing pale green/yellow on dark grey super blur-o-vision screen that INSTANTLY BLURS ALL MOVEMENT ON SCREEN (Galaxian is a real joke cartridge for GB, you might as well disconnect the screen for all the good it does when playing that game!). It sold on the quality of the games, however as C64 absolutely rips GB a new one in every genre I'm sorry but even C= couldn't fark up such a genius machine with all the fruits of talented people who produced games on the C64 from 1982 to the early 90s.

So....they did something even worse, they never even thought of it....instead they spent millions re-tooling for high MBit carts for the C64GS and building a C64 console which can't use 99% of the amazing C64 software catalogue it had built up in the thousands since 1982.

If anyone ever read the Computer and Video Games magazine console guide take on the situation you would know what I am talking about. In summer 1990 C+VG when reviewing SNES/Megadrive/PC Engine/GX4000/NEOGEO/Gameboy/Gamegear/Lynx etc also reviewed the C64GS (Commodore 64 console with no keyboard but suspiciously the same height width and depth as Commodore 64 computer case) they said that they wouldn't recommend this machine BUT they did tell people to go and buy a C64 instead and play 100s and 100s of excellent games. Say what you want about me but when it comes to computer games expertise only one magazine in the world ever had the right to give an opinion and that was UKs CVG magazine, they were there when home computer/console gaming was born and they lasted right to the end of the last console generation and DirectX9 XP PC games. Commodore did nothing with their most envied possession, the Commodore 64 back catalogue of games. The C64 has more excellent games than EVERY console or computer produced from the start to the current day. Because Amiga games were such badly programmed sh1t like Outrun or Afterburner and only a handful of Shadow of the Beast quality games were made it doesn't even come close to matching the C64 experience.

1982 technology home computer being recommended to people reading reviews of Sega/Nintendo 16bit game consoles? Would EDGE tell you to go out and buy an Atari Jaguar instead of an Xbox 360? That's the technological gap we are talking here, the games really were that good according to the king of games magazines from 1980 to this century!

So there you have it, not slitting medhi ali's throat on his second day of employment at Commodore and not making a C64 gameboy rip-off = FAIL!

(medhi ali doesn't deserve capital letters on his name)

[bbond007]

Originally Posted by djos

Commodore could have used EGA Monitors as the standard on the 500/2000 and VGA on the 3000/4000 but still used OCS/ECS and AGA. This would have likely saved money and allowed the Amiga to be taken more seriously due to not being another plug into a TV job.

The RGB port on the A500/2000 will use an EGA or CGA monitors. It looks really bad because those monitors are "digital" and predefined palette of 16 colors which don't map well to anything.

[djos]

Originally Posted by bbond007

The RGB port on the A500/2000 will use an EGA or CGA monitors. It looks really bad because those monitors are "digital" and predefined palette of 16 colors which don't map well to anything.

Ah ok, I didnt realise that.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by lassie

Hi why do you guys think commodore went under?

In two words? Moore's Law.

"Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it"
Currently reading the Bagnall book and while C= toplevel was good at business they had few clues about technology. If they had, they would have invested in R&D and been willing to kill their own golden geese.

[persia]

On the other hand there was very little Commodore could have done to survive. Even if they took the money spent on beer and chips and put it into the Amiga it's hard to see them surviving. The 90's were converging on the PC. Custom chips on the motherboard were giving way to generic graphics cards which could be replaced. Window 95 was the final nail in the coffin. I remember an Amiga user's group meeting on the Windows 95 release day, the speaker was trashing Windows 95 right and left, and I knew the sun had set on C= and the Amiga.

But as I said, even though Commodore management was thoroughly incompetent it made no difference, there was no winning move.

[OlafS3]

If they would have had a good management they would have invested their money in the new AAA but finally gone the "Apple-way", using standard-hardware with their own portable and adaptable OS. I also do not believe that custom chipsets had a chance with the fast developing PC market and the falling prices of standard hardware. Perhaps something like AROS but of course closed source.

But at that time (I can remember myself) I am not sure if most users would have followed this route (because of the hate against PCs by many)

[duga]

Originally Posted by persia

On the other hand there was very little Commodore could have done to survive. Even if they took the money spent on beer and chips and put it into the Amiga it's hard to see them surviving. The 90's were converging on the PC. Custom chips on the motherboard were giving way to generic graphics cards which could be replaced. Window 95 was the final nail in the coffin. I remember an Amiga user's group meeting on the Windows 95 release day, the speaker was trashing Windows 95 right and left, and I knew the sun had set on C= and the Amiga.

Of course the time with custom chips had to come to an end. The Apple way was the way to go; Power PC (during the 90's and later x86 around '05) and PC parts but with a much more efficient Amiga OS than Mac OS and Windows 9x.

In the 80's the Amigas number one feature was the custom chips.
In the 90's the Amigas number one feature was the OS. Remember that Windows (1, 2, 3, 9x, not counting NT) was a toy before Windows 2000.

Regarding Windows it got more bloated for every version up until Vista, now it's actually getting more efficient for every version (7 and 8). That should be something that Amiga users like.

[OlafS3]

Amiga-Users will never like what MS does :-)

Expecially when I remember that I read that they killed "Amiga" by making a "friendly" call... I can believe these reports...

[lsmart]

Originally Posted by persia

The 90's were converging on the PC. [...]
But as I said, even though Commodore management was thoroughly incompetent it made no difference, there was no winning move.

I am not so sure about that. It`s hard to say what would have happened, if Commodore never sold PCs and had a 3D capable Amiga 1200 ready in 1992.

It`s hard to say what would have happened, if Commodore took the other route and abandoned Amiga in favor of x86 in 1988 and introduced a Commodore PC that was capable of running Workbench on MS-DOS and had a good video- and sound interface before Windows, SVGA and Soundblaster 16 would conquer the market.