Quote:
Originally Posted by Unknown_K
Amiga could have lived if they basically switched to cheap X86 architecture in a A500 case and ported Amiga OS over to multitask DOS/Windows 3.1/OS2. No reason they could not have mad a mac version of the A500 as well.
Compatible, cheap, and adds something better. There was plenty of money to be made making cheaper clones in the 1990's, especially when you don't bother with advertising budgets.
|
But wouldn't that mean having to contract and pay another company to design and sell cheap Amiga clones? Could Commodore afford to do that when they were losing money at that point?
I may be completely wrong about this, but making cheap clones requires that most of the hardware components can be bought off-the-shelf. Apart from the CPU, most of the Amiga's hardware was custom-built. How can you design and sell a cheap clone if the original hardware was almost proprietary?
Then again, I'm probably just making up very stupid or baseless points.
EDIT: Well, you could outsource development of a cheap Amiga clone to China or wherever, but then you would have to put up with communication problems. Maybe the possible situation of Intellectual Property theft.