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[hasek]

They let the PC get more powerfull and powerfull until they
get crushed.

The Head Manager thought Amiga was just a game computer without thinking we can also work with it.

They do not provide a amiga with a built in hard disk.

They thought they :-x had only one enemy atari.

they get screwed by IBM Microsoft and pcs.

[Matt_H]

They do not provide a amiga with a built in hard disk.

On the contrary, some 1200s and 600s, most later model 2000s, and nearly all 3000s and 4000s shipped with harddrives.

[hasek]

i meant, the first amigas "cheap" 500 had not a harddrive shipped, in
stead of coporate pcs

if they had, i think todays most companies in the world would have Amigas instead of PCs

[Matt_H]

I'm afraid I still disagree. The A500 shipped in 1987. Hard drives were still expensive and somewhat rare back then. It would have put the price outside the range of what people were willing to spend and therefore would have ruined much of the hobby market back then. A low price used to be a killer selling point for Amigas.

You may be on to something though. The way to compare would be to see if PCs from that era usually shipped with a hard drive.

[Ilwrath]

i meant, the first amigas "cheap" 500 had not a harddrive shipped, in
stead of coporate pcs

if they had, i think todays most companies in the world would have Amigas instead of PCs

I don't think that would have made much difference. When the first Amiga 500's shipped (1988?) look at where the PC was. MS-DOS4.0 came out that year. There were quite a few low-end PCs that didn't ship with hard disks. Heck, the hard drive was optional on the geniune IBM 8088 models, (which were being sold in 87, still, I believe!) and those things cost a few times what an Amiga 500 did.

If you want to say clueless management killed Amiga, I won't argue with you there, but I don't think it was at all a mistake having the A500 ship without hard drive. The 2000 was aimed at businesses, and it had optional HD. I don't think you could buy a 2500, 3000, 4000 without HD (unless you cut a deal with your local supplier/store).

[hasek]

yes it is a good focus point.

If only companies thought we could also have text processors as word on amigas.

Pfff :-(

[Plaz]

The "really worst" thing they did... Put all their time and money into the PC Colt project. They wasted all the resourses they needed to make Amiga a competitive desktop computer on a pitiful IBM clone that wasn't even compatible enough to run regular business software. I don't remember the packages acuratly after all these years, but our small company tried to use a couple of Colts and they would lock up. While cheaper generic clone boxes ran the same software fine. What a waste of millions of dollars and time.

Plaz

[MarkTime]

Commodore's big mistake was the CD32.
This product was not competitive in the game market, it does not fair well in comparison to true 32bit game consoles.

Actually Atari made the same mistake with the Jaguar...it was certainly not 64bit and also did not compete well with the 32bit platforms of the time.

The fact that Atari and Amiga were dueling in this stupid fest only helped them both fail slightly quicker.

my 2 cents

[MarkTime]

p.s. when is the console version of the AmigaONE coming out?

[Rodney]

I think marketing had something to do with it. Before i got the A1200, i had only heard of Amiga's. And that was the A500. I had not seen any tv adds, non in brochers or anytype of ad... That is i think i big no no. Commador didnt milk their own products enough. They lacked the forsight to see what they really had and they didnt do their marketing well enough.

I remember when we got our A1200, when it first came out, it had know harddrive... we updated to a harddrive, 16M of RAM and got an 030 CPU card... Besides being freakingly expensive, Commador should still be around if they had just made a few more smart decisions...

Talking about dumb stuff... What was that A600 all about? I used to think it was an A1200 with a smaller keyboard... Later someone told me it was an A500+ with smaller keyboard or something.... Why, why did they do that? stupid!!

[B00tDisk]

hasek wrote:

They let the PC get more powerfull and powerfull until they
get crushed.

What in god's green earth were they supposed to have done? Sent in a Commodore-Einsatzgruppen team to mop up all the engineers at Intel and AMD?

:roll:

The Head Manager thought Amiga was just a game computer without thinking we can also work with it.

Uh.

No.

Try again. Look at all of the productivity (music, art, etc.) programs that were there when the Amiga left the gate back in '85.

They do not provide a amiga with a built in hard disk.

In 1985 (A1000) or even '87 (A500, A2000?), that would've put the price of the systems in the stratosphere.

By comparison, the 1983/84 Apple Lisa had a 5mb HD and that pushed the price up to $10k per unit.

They thought they :-x had only one enemy atari.

Finally, something on the head. They focussed too much on nuking Atari due to the bad blood between the two. It was the depths of stupidity. I mean, come on. Commodore was producing Big Box Amigas (A2000, A3000, A3000T) when Atari was still making dinky little C128 sized STs.

[/quote]
they get screwed by IBM Microsoft and pcs.[/quote]
They got screwed by managerial incompetence.

[iamaboringperson]

(why on earth is this in the 'games' thread?)

they did very well with the C64, and i believe that because they sold that so well, they probably believed anything with the word 'commodore' would sell - even without advertising
we all know they were wrong!
one thing i have learned in some of my marketing classes, is customers(for the most part)arent loyal
another thing i learned is to ADVERTISE!!

[T_Bone]

Matt_H wrote:

On the contrary, some 1200s and 600s, most later model 2000s, and nearly all 3000s and 4000s shipped with harddrives.

My first Amiga, a 200HD had a hard drive as standard (hence the HD in it's name) :-P

[Atheist]

The A2000 should have had a 68020 @ 14MHz, and 14MHz OCS (the A500 as well). AND sockets for more ram chips (or simm slots, but Alkis doesn't think simms existed then), and the bridge board slot and ISA bus was a HUGE waste of time and money.

A midi port should have been put on the MB.

AmigaOne! Amiga had an INSANE amount of potential!

[commodore_jim]

@Hasek

Without wishing to sound like some sort of fervent cheerleader for Commodore, I think it's unfair to lay all the blame at their door with the points you've made.

For a start, one thing was assured - the PC was going to become as big as it became, regardess of whether Commodore had survived or not.

Although Commodore may have kept the technological lead for a while, who knows? Perhaps they would have been forced to completely re-evaluate the Amiga, dropping the custom hardware to remain competitive. Or maybe they would have licensed the chipset out to interested parties for Amiga clones or other technologies. Perhaps they might have dropped the Amiga altogether. Who knows?

As for the hard-drive issue, this was something of a vicious circle and the software publishers of the time need to accept some responsilibltiy also.

Commodore didn't ship hard-drives with early Amigas such as the 500 because most of the popular games software, i.e. arcade games, were not hard-drive installable.

Conversely, many software publishers didn't make their games hard-drive installable since Amigas weren't shipping with hard-drives installed (although I suspect this was a convenient excuse used by many publishers to produce non hard-drive installable titles, as copy protection would be even more difficult).

What was needed was for one side to show some faith and Commodore did this by shipping the 600 and 1200 with hard-drives as optional extras.

Still, many developers refused to play ball.

Of course by this time Commodore was haemorrhaging money and many developers were jumping ship anyway.

Tee-hoo.