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Originally Posted by AmigaHope
The "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." was the real reason, as someone mentioned. It was NOT a cult though, it was simple business politics. When you are in middle management at a company, and you try to do something innovative, you get punished when something goes wrong. You do not get punished if you do what everyone else is doing and something fails, then it's either attributed to bad luck or a mistake by your suppliers.
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It's a nice quote and to some extent it was a contributing factor. But to use it as a sole "reason" is just another magic bullet narrative. In reality businesses went for IBM because aside from being a well known brand, their PC computers had some very strong qualities, such as being truly modular or having killer apps such as 1-2-3. The near instaneous appearance of the clones unified under the "IBM-compatible" banner also hinted at the incoming future with many manufacturers (ergo cheaper prices) but one standard - something which is a huge boon for both business and home users.
The other thing is that in 1983 alone "50-70% units sold went to households". It was a home computer from the get go, not just a business machine.
The funny thing is that the openness and standards which IBM has introduced, and which eventually swept away everything else, also did it for the IBM itself. Once they realized it and tried to put the genie back in the bottle, it was way too late.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AmigaHope
The price/performance gap being closed and exceeded was what caused the fall of home computers in Europe. This was driven entirely by the huge market share in the US allowing for incredible amounts of R&D that no one company could match.
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The R&D everybody could contribute to was was there from the get go, because of the open standard, and the huge market share is partially the function of that, not the other way around.
The home computers fell because they were not needed anymore. PCs got cheaper and were used for school/work/creativity - but also had their own PC-centric game libraries. Consoles served the other type of games. Eventually, people could afford to own both, should they want to.
Personally, I'm quite happy with how things have turned out in general. The home computer sphere has some dominant players and problems, (mostly related to uinternet-enabled surveillance capitalism) but offers workable alternatives, if you really hate MS, or, say, Nvidia.
Conversely, if one of the old firms "won', which seems to be the underlying wish in these threads (on any forum) what would be the real outcome? We would be locked into one Apple-like hegemony, and the Amiga name would be despised just as much as Intel or MS are today, if not more, because there are alternatives to their stuff.
So, I'm quite happy to have the memories of being a part of these brilliant Amiga times back then, and the fact it still lives on as a hobbyist scene. I'd much rather have that, than it taking over the world and falling on its own sword in the process.