Some thoughts on why the Amiga didn't thrive

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yet strangely, many people in the US could afford a more expensive PC. Seems price wasn't the problem - and we all know what was. You don't buy an expensive computer (which they all were back then) unless there will be good software support. IBM had that in spades. The Amiga? Who knows... People didn't buy IBM computers for the hardware, they bought them to run PC software - the same reason they didn't buy Amigas.

But by 88, 89, the PC hardware was objective better than the Amiga for most kinds of software that mattered. Why on earth would someone buy an aging Amiga 2000 in 1988 when they could by a 286 clone with VGA for around the same amount? The Amiga wasn't capable of running the software that people wanted. Now, if ECS had some out in say 1987 with the Amiga 500/2000 who knows. But it didn't.

Developers making innovative software target the hardware that can make their stuff shine. The Amiga got the video toaster. The Mac got Page Maker. The PC got word processors and spreadsheets. In turn, people bought the computers for the software (like you said).

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Frogs

Why on earth would someone buy an aging Amiga 2000 in 1988 when they could by a 286 clone with VGA for around the same amount? The Amiga wasn't capable of running the software that people wanted.

Developers making innovative software target the hardware that can make their stuff shine. The Amiga got the video toaster. The Mac got Page Maker. The PC got word processors and spreadsheets. In turn, people bought the computers for the software (like you said).

I wanted an Amiga 500 in 1990 (at age 18) for the GAMES, and as it turned out, the DEMOS. Word processors and spreadsheets were hardly my priority at the time. Same for most teenagers at home. They'd leave the work stuff at college, as I did. No, we didn't get homework at my college courses like we did at school. Not in the same way, anyway.

As for the price difference you mention, it would make more sense in 1992-93, because at one point, I was talking about the price of the new Amiga 4000 vs the PC at the time with one of the "cool" lecturers, a nerdy guy everyone liked, and even he scoffed when I mentioned the price, compared to a PC. Heck, even someone I knew at college who had had an A500 sold it to pay for a second-hand PC to do college work on.

I held onto my A1200 for a while longer, using CrossDOS to transfer PC files to Amiga and back again, so I could do some of the college coursework at home, but software incompatibilities, or my lack of understanding of how "line feed" and "carriage return" differed on their text editors, made a lot more work for me.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Frogs

But by 88, 89, the PC hardware was objective better than the Amiga for most kinds of software that mattered.

Yes, and that's my point. The PC's hardware was better for running that software because it was compatible with that software.

Why on earth would someone buy an aging Amiga 2000 in 1988 when they could by a 286 clone with VGA for around the same amount? The Amiga wasn't capable of running the software that people wanted. Now, if ECS had some out in say 1987 with the Amiga 500/2000 who knows. But it didn't.

Wouldn't have made any difference. People didn't buy PCs to get superior hardware - they bought them to run PC software.

You ask why anyone would buy an 'aging' A2000 in 1988, only one year after it was released. Take a look at the graphs below - what PCs were people buying in 1988? Equal amounts of 8088 and 80286 machines, few 386s, no 486s. Not many had VGA because a complete setup (card + monitor) was significantly more expensive, especially if you wanted a good one. Most clones had the cheapest stuff possible in them, and many of them were pure junk (I know because I was doing PC support in the late 80's) but that didn't matter. The important thing was that they could run PC software.

Developers making innovative software target the hardware that can make their stuff shine. The Amiga got the video toaster. The Mac got Page Maker. The PC got word processors and spreadsheets. In turn, people bought the computers for the software (like you said).

That's only partly true. Plenty of 'innovative' software has been developed for under-performing hardware. While a particular hardware feature may provide inspiration, in most cases a platform is targeted simply because it's there. Developers struggled with the PC's limitations (slow CPU, limited memory, plethora of hardware configurations etc.) but stuck with it because they would get the sales they needed. It wouldn't have mattered how amazing the Amiga's hardware was, without the numbers it was not worth developing for.

Having said that, quite a lot of innovative software was produced for the Amiga, but you never heard of it because it didn't have the visibility of PC stuff. For example, at a time when most businesses in New Zealand were using crappy DOS accounting programs written in QuickBASIC, I was using and selling Easy Ledgers. Apart from running on the Amiga, it had several attractive features compared to the DOS accounting programs. One was that it didn't have to load in different modules depending on what you doing because the Amiga had plenty of linearly addressable RAM. Another was that it held all the invoices in its database for as long as you wanted, whereas popular DOS programs insisted on forgetting invoices after printing them to save memory. Since we often had to refer to old invoices and didn't want to keep paper records, this was very useful to us.

But such innovations didn't help sales of the software. Accountants didn't like Easy Ledgers because they couldn't just copy the database onto their machines to work on client's books. And of course all the businesses had PCs, so they couldn't run it anyway.

IIRC the source code for Easy Ledgers was sold to a PC software company who developed a Windows accounting package based on it - not because it needed PC hardware but simply due to lack of sales on the Amiga. Many other 'innovative' Amiga applications also made their way to the PC for the same reason.

For the Amiga it was the classic chicken and egg problem - how to attract software development without a large user base, and how to make sales when little software is available. In comparison the PC had two huge advantages - a 4 year head start, and IBM's reputation for business support. As soon as IBM announced the PC developers clamored to get stuff onto it, knowing that the market would be huge. Nothing like that happened for Commodore, and software companies who did see the Amiga's potential were disappointed by the low sales compared to PCs - which was entirely predictable. Once the PC entered the scene the fate of any competing platform was virtually sealed - no matter how good its hardware.

[Minuous]

@Frogs:

ECS was the most crap "upgrade" ever, Commodore should not have bothered with it at all.

As for word processors and spreadsheets, there has never been a shortage of those on the Amiga, except perhaps in the first year or so after it came out (like any other machine).

[grond]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yet strangely, many people in the US could afford a more expensive PC. Seems price wasn't the problem

Perhaps this is nonsense but this just came up in some undercoffeinated part of my brain: a lot of people have always seemed to me to be more concerned about whether they can set an investment off against tax liability or not than about the actual amount of money they effectively invest. Is it possible that you could easily deduct (a lot of) money spent on a "business" PC from your taxable income while you couldn't do that with (less) money spent on a "home computer"?

[grond]

Originally Posted by Minuous

@Frogs:

ECS was the most crap "upgrade" ever, Commodore should not have bothered with it at all.

ECS was the far more complex upgrade than ECS=>AGA because it made pixel clocks programmable. AGA only added bitplane DMA for two additional bitplanes and some sprite stuff. ECS in itself allowed connecting to a VGA monitor and provided real high-res screenmodes, AGA only added colours. From the usability point of view of the Amiga for boring work ECS was far more important than AGA.

ECS only appeared a minor upgrade than AGA because its advantages remained invisible for the huge inert mass of 1084 owners.

[Foebane]

AGA was AWESOME, grond. I will NOT hear bad stuff said about it. End of.

[duga]

Originally Posted by grond

ECS was the far more complex upgrade than ECS=>AGA because it made pixel clocks programmable. AGA only added bitplane DMA for two additional bitplanes and some sprite stuff. ECS in itself allowed connecting to a VGA monitor and provided real high-res screenmodes, AGA only added colours. From the usability point of view of the Amiga for boring work ECS was far more important than AGA.

ECS only appeared a minor upgrade than AGA because its advantages remained invisible for the huge inert mass of 1084 owners.

And ECS added border blank.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Foebane

AGA was AWESOME, grond. I will NOT hear bad stuff said about it. End of.

Hehehe. AGA was the stuff we cared about but not relevant at all for the boring work stuff. Even today there is no reason to use more than a few colours for productivity stuff. Resolution on the other hand, can't have too much of it.

[phx]

Originally Posted by Frogs

Why on earth would someone buy an aging Amiga 2000 in 1988 when they could by a 286 clone with VGA for around the same amount?

There were affordable VGA cards in 1988?

Seen with the eyes of a teenager in the late 80s the PC didn't exist at all (at least here in Germany), as we rarely hang around in offices at that time.

I cannot remember that I ever saw somebody owning or using a PC until somewhere in the 90s. All class mates and friends had Amiga, C64 or Atari. I knew they exist, but their hardware was absolutely unattractive for the price and can't do the things which matter for us (games, music, being creative).

Later I stuck with the Amiga, because I was convinced the architecture and the OS is better, although the raw CPU power of PCs became superiour. And I liked developing on it much more.

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by grond

ECS only appeared a minor upgrade than AGA because its advantages remained invisible for the huge inert mass of 1084 owners.

Exactly, there was no advantage for the vast majority of users. Commodore should have realized that no one was likely to go and buy a new Amiga and an expensive new monitor just to get a 4-colour screenmode that was only 640 pixels across and supported by hardly any software.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Minuous

Exactly, there was no advantage for the vast majority of users. Commodore should have realized that no one was likely to go and buy a new Amiga and an expensive new monitor just to get a 4-colour screenmode that was only 640 pixels across and supported by hardly any software.

If Commodore had thought like that, we would never have seen the A3000 (for which ECS was implemented aiming at high-end professional users) nor A4000 and wouldn't have progressed beyond a 7MHz 68000 either. The A3000 was an attempt to get into the higher margin computer business and the purpose of most of the innovations the A3000 brought was overcoming exactly the limitations identified by Frogs and his dad.

[duga]

Originally Posted by phx

There were affordable VGA cards in 1988?

Hardly.

[duga]

Originally Posted by grond

If Commodore had thought like that, we would never have seen the A3000 (for which ECS was implemented aiming at high-end professional users) nor A4000 and wouldn't have progressed beyond a 7MHz 68000 either. The A3000 was an attempt to get into the higher margin computer business and the purpose of most of the innovations the A3000 brought was overcoming exactly the limitations identified by Frogs and his dad.

Maybe adding a 15/31 KHz option in the Early Startup Menu (including when booting without Startup-Sequence) for ECS machines from ROM 2.x and forward would've made a bigger impact than the scandoubler/flicker fixer in the A3000.

[Frogs]

Yes, and that's my point. The PC's hardware was better for running that software because it was compatible with that software.

@Bruce, compatible in the sense that the Amiga's hardware was incapable of supporting such software. No one wants to run these programs at low resolution if they can run it at 640x480.

I just want to make sure we're on the same page here. Users chose the PCs because of the software. We agree on that. But the software couldn't have been made for the Amiga because the Amiga's hardware didn't support the features the software needed.

You ask why anyone would buy an 'aging' A2000 in 1988, only one year after it was released. Take a look at the graphs below - what PCs were people buying in 1988? Equal amounts of 8088 and 80286 machines, few 386s, no 486s.

The 286 was mainly what they were buying in 1988 which was faster than the 68k. And there were more 386's shipping per year than Amigas.

In short: The PC got the software people wanted because the Amiga was physically incapable of running that software. There is no chicken/egg situation by 1988. Word processing, spread sheets, CAD, desktop publishing, graphics design, etc. These things did better at higher resolutions and the Amiga's hardware wasn't capable of competing.

That's one of the myths that seems to permeate this thread at times. The myth being that the Amiga was this universally superior piece of hardware but the blind masses just picked the PC instead because they're lemmings or don't want to think. But that's not what happened. The Amiga had the heart of the ultimate game machine with some additional cool features. But it did not have the hardware necessary to work well as a general productivity machine. In 1985 it was slightly behind in that area. By 1988 it was not in the same league.

What the Amiga offered was a *user experience* that was 10+ years ahead of its time. A next-generation GUI, true preemptive multitasking. Plug-and-Play. A modern file system. That's one of the reasons we all love it. We got a sneak preview of the future.

That's why I keep harping that if the Amiga had had ECS at launch might have gone in a very different direction. A 640x480 productivity mode in 1985 could have made all the difference in the world. ECS in 1990 was too late.

What no one knew at the time was that there was a minimum resolution threshold for doing productivity work in graphics mode and it turned out to be somewhere near a minimum of 640 pixels across and 480 pixels vertically. That was the threshold sufficient to open up all kinds of new types of software and make many types of existing software sufficiently pleasant to use versus a typewriter or other physical media (I used typewriters myself rather than word processing until this point).

There were affordable VGA cards in 1988?

The ATI VGA Wonder could do 256 colors at 640x480 and was $450 in 1987. Regular VGA cards were about half that.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by grond

Perhaps this is nonsense but this just came up in some undercoffeinated part of my brain: a lot of people have always seemed to me to be more concerned about whether they can set an investment off against tax liability or not than about the actual amount of money they effectively invest. Is it possible that you could easily deduct (a lot of) money spent on a "business" PC from your taxable income while you couldn't do that with (less) money spent on a "home computer"?

Absolutely. A "business" PC was effectively free provided the business was making a profit, and if having one helped do that...

Originally Posted by Minuous

Exactly, there was no advantage for the vast majority of users. Commodore should have realized that no one was likely to go and buy a new Amiga and an expensive new monitor just to get a 4-colour screenmode that was only 640 pixels across and supported by hardly any software.

Not only that, but since 1988 there was a better solution for 'serious' (ie. A2000) users - the Microway AGA2000 flicker fixer. This doubled all OCS screen modes, so it was transparent to software and you could use a VGA monitor for everything.

[saimon69]

But such innovations didn't help sales of the software. Accountants didn't like Easy Ledgers because they couldn't just copy the database onto their machines to work on client's books. And of course all the businesses had PCs, so they couldn't run it anyway.

I bet this was before CrossDos was released - and was around also for Ks 1.2 and 1.3; with a crystal ball sense of awareness i would have bundled the program sales together with CrossDos and some format translation software between packages, but in half 80s the concept of interoperability was mostly unknown for home machines - actually Amiga itself was one of the pioneers for it!

[duga]

Originally Posted by Frogs

The ATI VGA Wonder could do 256 colors at 640x480 and was $450 in 1987. Regular VGA cards were about half that.

You needed a PC to put that card in though.

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by grond

If Commodore had thought like that, we would never have seen the A3000 (for which ECS was implemented aiming at high-end professional users) nor A4000 and wouldn't have progressed beyond a 7MHz 68000 either.

I don't follow your logic: not bothering with ECS would have meant the CPU couldn't be upgraded? How so? And I fail to see what the A4000 has to do with anything, it has AGA which was a much more worthwhile upgrade than ECS.

Is it possible that you could easily deduct (a lot of) money spent on a "business" PC from your taxable income while you couldn't do that with (less) money spent on a "home computer"?

I doubt any business owner would have much problem convincing the government that the computer(s) they bought from Commodore Business Machines was/were being used for business.

[Signman]

You could have used tax write offs with amiga providing it is on business premises or home office. Doubtful in the U.S. that the IRS would challenge especially with business software on it.

A write off doesn’t make your computer free though just helps with overall tax assessment. Still got to write the check.