Some thoughts on why the Amiga didn't thrive

[Nobby_UK]

"didn't thrive"
???
It did !
It just didn't survive ---
Why ? Commodore

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

For me, this is thinking in black & white. Without replacing the PC, don't you think the Amiga could have thrive much more than it had and have Commodore a place similar to Apple in terms of fame?

We can speculate on how much the Amiga could have 'thrived' if this or that had been different.

If IBM management had realized the true potential of the desktop computer market they might have produced a machine that was harder to clone, which then might have become just another computer line with limited popularity and lifespan like the PS/2. With Apple not being squeezed out of the business market they might not have felt so much pressure to develop the Macintosh, and Amiga could have roared ahead with its ground-breaking multitasking OS and advanced custom chips. Now with Motorola being the number one supplier of 16 bit CPUs they would roar ahead of Intel, who would continue trying to develop their iAPX 432 and ultimately fail. Microsoft would of course pander to the big player - Amiga - which would then have the best hardware and software in the industry!

But once IBM made that fateful decision to make a 'cheap' Apple-II killer instead of a serious machine, the rest was bound to follow. Commodore apparently could see where the business market was going because they continued to produce PC clones. But their home computers were very successful too, so they thought the Amiga would have similar success - not realizing that the home computer market was about to be overrun by PCs. Tandy did realize it and quickly dropped their more advanced 68k design to concentrate on a line of enhanced PC Jr clones - the Tandy 1000 series - which stole even more of the home market.

Commodore could (theoretically) have done a better job of designing and marketing the Amiga, which might have extended its lifespan by a few years. But with PC clones multiplying it was only a matter of time before everything else would be squeezed out, so no 'alternative' manufacturer had much chance to survive long-term. In 1992 IBM suffered a loss of US$5 Billion, the largest in American corporate history. By 1993 Tandy had bowed out, selling their computer business to AST (which itself folded in 2001). By 1995 Apple's share of the market dropped below 6%, and with Windows 95 released nobody needed a Mac anymore. Clones now had 85% of the market and the PC juggernaut was unstoppable.

People who complain about Commodore's mismanagement ignore the environment and the realities of business. Other companies didn't do much better, and didn't manage to produce a line of computers as unique and innovative that would continue to captivate their owners to this day. In some ways Commodore's 'incompetence' was a good thing, because while other manufacturers were constantly bringing out new models that muddied the water, Commodore's slower slower pace and emphasis on maintaining compatibility for existing owners made the Amiga community more inclusive (unlike developments after they were gone). We should be thankful that they folded when they did, surviving just long enough to give us wonderful machines like the A1200 and CD32, but not subjecting us to the abominations of Power PC and OS 4 etc.

The unanswered question I have is: could the hard have delivered a better experience taking into account the limitations of what electronic components were available, especially RAM? Perhaps the Amiga was just a bit too ahead of its time and we had the best of what was possible.

Theoretically yes, but in practice it couldn't happen because Commodore didn't have the resources to make it happen. Their chip fab was out of date, and design tools of the the time were not quite up to the level required to develop what they wanted fast and cheap enough. You could argue that their engineers weren't smart enough, or that they didn't pump enough money into R&D, but that was the reality of their position. They tried and failed to produce AAA - which is on the engineers, not management. And they didn't have the money to do more for various reasons - none of which were easily fixable.

On the point of electronic components, Commodore could have been able to make sparks 5 years before the Amiga. At a time they had Chuck Peddle, MOS technology and the Moore Park R&D facility. Perhaps they would have been able to produce better RAM for the market and put it into the Amiga when the time comes. OK, I drift.

They did make sparks several years before the Amiga. But unless you have designed and produced something similar using the tools available at the time, and had to compete in that market, you probably have no idea how hard it was.

In 1980 Chuck Peddle founded Sirius Systems Technology, which eventually produced a computer called the Victor 9000. By 1984 the company was bankrupt. Just being a smart engineer isn't isn't enough - you need smart marketing too. Often these two things are in conflict.

I could cite plenty more examples of technically superior products that didn't make it in the marketplace for one reason or another - often because the engineers who designed it didn't understand the realities of business. Commodore walked a fine line between them for many years, managing to outsell the competition despite serious flaws in their products. Could any of us done better? Perhaps, but as many have found out, reality often gets in the way of the best-laid plans.

The VIC 20 was supposed to have a fast serial bus, but the 6522 VIA had a design flaw that wasn't picked up until the last minute. This then affected the C64 even worse because the VIC chip blocked CPU access at certain times, making the floppy drive even slower. They could have fixed it but the market couldn't wait - and in the end it didn't matter anyway because customers put up with the longer load times. They fixed the problem in the C128, but it had another problem - they advertised it as being CP/M compatible to capture some of the business market, but the engineers couldn't get the Z80 card working properly. So again a compromise was reached where the hardware didn't work as well as it could - to get the product out the door on time.

Jay Miner and co spent 2 years and all their investment capital trying to design the Amiga, and desperately needed backing. Commodore provided it, but it took another 2 years before the machine was truly finished. During this time the market was moving towards PCs, whose hardware technology was leaping ahead. With such a moving target any sensible investor would pull the pin, but Commodore kept at it - for which we should be eternally grateful. Despite their missteps, Commodores' backing and continued commitment to the Amiga is what gave us the machines we know and love. A more 'competent' company would have given us nothing.

[b0lt-thrower]

For me, as an American, what drew me to the Amiga was doing graphics and later 3d graphics. 3d tools and 2d painting tools seemed so natural and easy-to-use on the Amiga compared to doing anything like that on the PC. When I took my first tentative steps onto Usenet in the late 1980s, encountering folks who viewed an otherwise unexpanded 512k or 1mbyte A500 as being just find was confusing, and that their only interest in the Amiga was playing floppy-only video games or the odd demo disk was just mind-boggling.

[Pyromania]

@b0lt-thrower

I too was draw to the Amiga because of its graphics capabilities. NewTek products also interested me. The 286 I compared the A500 to just seem so boring and limited. I could not see myself ever buying or being interested in that beast. Later on I bought and added a ATonce card to my A500 to give myself access to all the applications for PC. I regretted this purchase since all the apps I tried were rather uninteresting and nothing special.

[b0lt-thrower]

There's been a lot of talk about what the PC could and couldn't do at this time, but one thing that is overlooked a bit, probably because it is largely a footnote compared to true VGA, was the IBM Professional Graphics System, which was a triple-slot dedicated GPU for the PC that could push out 256 colors in I believe 640x480; however, this card was not recognized by the PC BIOS, it required its own separate drivers, and was designed for specialized video and graphics applications. Other manufacturers cloned this massive board and its functions (companies such as Orchid), but it didn't see widespread adoption. Interesting to note that at least until the late 1990s, most graphic cards had its modes as addressable if for some reason you wanted to run a CAD program from the 1980s under DOS in your shiny new Pentium 233mmx, you could.

It ran about $4k, which was the cost of a kitted out PC and while that is very expensive, it was capable of doing graphics that only dedicated graphic workstations that cost five figures could otherwise do. Sort of a "video toaster" for the PC, at the time.

[tommywiz]

I bought my Amiga 2000 to mainly play games, some productivity work, with the expandability being a big factor!

I soon learned that while it was expandable it wasn't practical!
For not much more money I could build a PC clone and have two computers.
Adding a genlock or toaster was beyond what I wanted to spend.

The way I used it could have been done with a cheaper Amiga 500.

[TEG]

@Bruce Abbott

I understand your argument and I'm sensible to it. I know well how much it's easy for those who does nothing to give lessons to those who build things or are the ones who battle with the reality.

But this is well know that there was obvious problems with CBM management. Under Tramiel area, "A company on the hedge" give details and we know that Gould was interested by immediate profits.

So I don't think that saying that "they did the best they can due to the circumstances" is objective. Same for "it could no been otherwise".

We try to examine the past to learn from it and I don't think we live in a close universe.

About AAA, Ian Matthews is from a different opinion than yours:

While it is critically important for a President provide investor confidence, it is even more critical that staff believe you know what you are doing and follow your lead. Investors were initially happy with Ali but the staff were becoming increasingly frustrated with his apparent lack of vision. Commodore staff openly derided Ali and his management team. Moral steadily fell, good staff left the company and the business really started to unravel.

In particular Ali decided cut the one cost center that technology companies can’t live without, R&D. With R&D slashed, new products languished, sometimes for years. The much discussed Amiga AAA chipset was started in 1989 but still wasn’t complete in 1994. Engineers were forced to rehash old and limited technologies, so products like the never to be released Commodore 65, a modestly upgraded C64 running in 8 bit mode (in a 16 bit and soon to be 32 bit world) was scares resources were spent.

source

By the way, about the subject, I stumble upon an excellent article. The "Amiga failed because it wasn’t easy to buy" part is especially interesting.

Why Amiga failed

I defiantly celebrated the 25th anniversary of Windows 95 by buying myself an Amiga 500. That relic from 1987 did everything Windows 95 did, and it ran an operating system that first appeared on the market 10 years before Windows 95. It was easily 10 years ahead of its time. But it flopped. Here’s why Amiga failed.
There wasn’t any single thing that brought Amiga and its parent company, Commodore, down. If anything, the Amiga is a cautionary tale of how good engineering won’t save you if you get everything else wrong.

The Amiga and market penetration

First, let’s take a look at markets. Markets can be a funny thing. We have two standards for smartphones, Apple and Android. Yet we have three standards for video game consoles, with Sony Playstation, Nintendo, and Microsoft Xbox. We had two standards for VCRs and for high definition DVD, yet in both cases, one died out early and the other thrived.
The simplistic answer about what survives is that the cheap enough, good enough solution usually survives. But that doesn’t explain Cyrix, an Intel competitor from the 1990s that tried the cheap enough/good enough combination and flamed out almost as quickly as Amiga did. It also doesn’t answer the question of markets that support two or three incompatible standards.
The magic number is somewhere around 16 percent. When a standard reaches 16 percent of its potential market, it survives. That’s critical mass for market penetration. When a competing product reaches 16 percent and you don’t, your product will fail.
In order to guarantee survival, Commodore needed to sell around 14 million Amigas in the United States. Some would argue 14 million worldwide would have done the trick, and maybe it would have, but that doesn’t matter because Commodore sold about 3 million Amigas worldwide, falling far short of that goal.
Apple had trouble getting to 14 million units, but they made it to that figure sometime in 1994 or 1995. Apple struggled in the late 90s but had enough viable units in use to remain viable. Commodore didn’t.
Commodore reached critical mass once with the C-64, or at least came reasonably close, so why couldn’t they do it again with the Amiga, which was a much more ambitious and innovative product?


Amiga marketing failures

The biggest problem with Commodore was marketing. Commodore’s marketing in the early 80s was pretty successful, but it was a pricing play. The VIC-20 sold well because it was the cheapest computer worth having. Everything that matched its price had something else wrong with it, and everything that beat its price lacked color, sound, and a full travel keyboard. The C-64 was a much better computer, which was what made it much more enduring, but it, too, was just a pricing play. No one else could deliver a home computer with 64K of memory, color, and sound at the C-64’s price.
Commodore’s marketing was pretty simple. Everyone else is ripping you off.
In 1985, Commodore ran an ad that was a variant on that rip-off theme, but it pitted the Commodore 128 against the Apple IIc. But it showed why the Commodore 128 was better. The Apple had very limited sound capability, so Commodore showed the Apple IIc buried in musical instruments and other consumer goods that the Commodore could imitate that the Apple couldn’t. Look how much better the 128 is, it said. And it’s cheaper too.
I had a Commodore 128 growing up, and I loved that machine. But the Amiga was in a different universe. Commodore never demonstrated in its advertising what the machine could do. They barely mentioned the machine had multitasking, let alone telling you why once you had it, you wouldn’t want to live without it. They had true multitasking 10 years before Microsoft and 15 years before Apple, but couldn’t tell you why you wanted it. Bill Gates was a marketing genius compared to anyone Commodore had. The most extreme marketing failure was the Amiga 600, but they had plenty of incompetence in other years too.
What Apple figured out that Commodore never did was that they needed to tell you why they built it. Commodore had no idea. And Jay Miner, the key engineer behind it, gave a [ Show youtube player ] in 1990, soon before he died. At least he could speak to why his machine was better. But he never said why he built it either.


Amiga failed partly because of price

The Amiga lost its price advantage over other machines. Upon release, it was about halfway between the Atari ST and the Macintosh. It was a much better computer than either, but Commodore couldn’t tell you why.
Like the C-64, the Amiga was full of custom chips Commodore made itself. And in 1982, it could make its own chips cheaper than anyone else could. But while other companies were updating their manufacturing process to make chips cheaper and more efficiently and adding factories, Commodore stood still. In 1986, they even closed one of their chipmaking facilities. At that time, Intel was modernizing its plants. Commodore needed to modernize that plant to use up-to-date manufacturing processes, then shift production from Pennsylvania to California and update the plant in Pennsylvania. If they’d done that, their chips would have been cheaper to make, and they could have cut prices when they needed to.
The Amiga’s chips pushed the limits of Commodore’s manufacturing capability, and the AGA chips in the last-generation Amigas exceeded it. Commodore had to farm out production of some of the key Amiga chips to VLSI and HP. Neither of them make chips anymore, but they were less far behind than Commodore.
The Amiga’s custom chips were key to its success. There wasn’t anything Commodore could buy off the shelf that could match their capability in the 1980s and early 1990s. But Commodore couldn’t tell you why they were worth paying extra. And over the years, that price gap kept widening while the advantage narrowed.
You don’t have to be cheaper to succeed. Apple proved that. But Commodore didn’t know any other way.


Amiga failed because it wasn’t easy to buy

Another key reason Amiga failed was because it wasn’t easy to buy one. In the C-64’s heyday, you could buy one at stores like Kmart and Target. And yes, at the time, it was about as easy to find a Kmart as it is to find a Target today.
Commodore decided that wasn’t good for its reputation, but they didn’t line up any alternative. Selling at mass market decimated their network of independent dealers, and stores like Best Buy and Circuit City were just in the process of going national. Commodore didn’t sell the Amiga there either. The only national chain that carried it was Software Etc., and only briefly. The Amiga 500 sold reasonably well through Software Etc, but Commodore couldn’t reach an agreement to keep its machines there continuously. And Software Etc wasn’t exactly the most stable of retail operations. They needed someplace better. Not instead, but in addition. And they didn’t have it.
When I bought my Amiga 500, I had to drive 100 miles to get it. Ironically, to get an Amiga in 1991, I had to drive about 50 miles. I would have needed to drive maybe five miles to get a PC and 20 miles to get a Mac. That’s why Apple sold a million Macs and PC makers collectively sold more than 15 million units that year.
Zealots like me will drive 50 miles if we like your stuff, but you can’t build a business for the ages like that.


3D gaming

The knock on the Amiga was that is was only a games machine. That wasn’t true, but the best titles were games. And then, in May 1992, Wolfenstein 3D came out and changed the world. Suddenly, the Amiga’s great platform games didn’t matter because PCs had a game in 3D. And Wolfenstein 3D ran just fine on a 386SX computer you could buy at any big-box electronics store.
The AGA Amigas came out in October 1992 and they narrowed the gap in graphics capability, exceeding PC chipsets in some regards, but not in 3D. A 386SX cost less that a similarly outfitted Amiga 1200, and could play Wolfenstein 3D, and you didn’t have to drive far to get one.
Commodore still sold all the Amiga 1200s it could make, but the advent of 3D gaming would have made it a tough climb back. They needed to sell 3-4 million units in 1993 to make up for lost ground, and of course they didn’t come close to doing that.


Software development

People point to Lotus 1-2-3 as the reason people bought IBM PCs, Visicalc as the reason they bought Apple IIs, and Aldus Pagemaker as the reason they bought Macs. There was no comparable killer app on the Amiga.
I think desktop video could have been it. Desktop video was the one thing Amigas could do easily that PCs and Macs couldn’t in the early 90s. Commodore recognized this to a degree, but didn’t develop anything in this space, and didn’t do anything to promote or tout the companies who were.
This became a chicken-and-egg problem. There weren’t enough machines to attract developers, but there wasn’t enough software to sell machines. Apple got around this by publishing software, and continues to do so. Commodore did too, in the early days of the 64. But they didn’t do the same with the Amiga.


Ultimately, Amiga failed due to mismanagement

Ultimately, Amiga’s failure shows Commodore’s mismanagement. You don’t have to get all of this right to survive, as Commodore’s successful international subsidiaries proved. Amigas sold much better in Europe, especially the UK, than they did in the United States. But it wasn’t enough, and in the crucial US market, management got it all wrong.
Irving Gould deserves most of the blame. He wasn’t interested in understanding the business. He saw Commodore as a piggybank to support his excessive 80s multimillionaire jetsetting lifestyle. And he wouldn’t hire CEOs and give them enough time to understand Commodore’s problems and turn them around. The legendary Jean-Louis Gassée told Gould he could turn Commodore around, but he needed three years with no interference from him. Gould never agreed to anything like that up front. He rarely gave anyone three years and never without interference. The only CEO who got three years was Mehdi Ali, and that was largely because he was in it for the piggybank scheme too, and willing to take less money than Gould.
Commodore is infamous for its mismanagement woes, so this probably isn’t news to you. How exactly they misstepped, and what they needed to do differently might be. It’s surprising how little success they actually needed in order to survive as a third standard, but it’s sad how far short they fell.

source

[b0lt-thrower]

Remember when C= was poised to enter the laptop game - they'd bought up a shitload of LCD displays to incorporate into a new C= portable. Then at CES some guy from I want to say either Compaq or Kaypro walked over to the C= booth where they were demoing a prototype, and had a long talk with some VP from Commodore and told him flatly that portables were a no-money dead-end. I imagine he did so in an attempt to stop C= with all its momentum at the time from the C64 from entering and thus similarly dominating the portable market, too.

Well, it worked, and said VP called HQ that *day* from the CES floor and had the project thrown out.

That's the kind of management stupidity that worked against C= despite their victories.

[tommywiz]

You bring up an interesting point on the availability of the Amiga. I honestly don't remember where my friends and I bought ours! I dont remember them being particularly difficult to find.
On Commodore in general. I was in the education profession in the early 80's and 90's. This was when computers were beginning to show up in classrooms. At conferences and workshops Apple would have a huge presence. Gave away all kinds of goodies to educators. They gave away lots of software, had drawings for complete computer systems, and offered fantastic deals to teachers and school systems. Commodore on the other hand, if they even showed up, had small booth with 2-3 people. I personally had a Commodore 64 and an Apple IIe at the time and knew how the C-64 blew away the Apple. Commodore simply didnt cater to the education market and Apple went out of their way to do so. So for someone that had to make a decision on which way to go for your school system choosing Apple was a no brainer, mainly because of their support.

[saimon69]

I continue to think on making a "Still pissed at Mehdi Ali" T-Shirt!!!

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by saimon69

I continue to think on making a "Still pissed at Mehdi Ali" T-Shirt!!!

I want one of those, can just see it Mehdi Ali in the front as Comical Ali quoting "Everything is wonderful" with the Titanic sinking in background with a Commodore logo.

Now thats a tshirt i would buy

[Foebane]

Amiga DIDN'T FAIL.

If it did, none of us would be talking about it TO THIS DAY.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Nobby_UK

"didn't thrive"
???
It did !
It just didn't survive ---
Why ? Commodore

That's true of ANY technology, none of it survives to the present day, they just become RETRO RELICS.

[d4rk3lf]

@lmimmfn

Like this?

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

@lmimmfn

Like this?

"Commodore" is a naval rank, and it doesn't make sense to have a naval rank marked on the side of a steamship, now does it?

I would've put the Commodore logo onto the ship itself. And why is the whole picture at an angle? If it's too wide, make it smaller, but don't angle it.

Come to think of it, I'd say make Ali bigger, and put him in the background with the sinking ship on the front, so it looks like he's overseeing the destruction personally!

I'd love to do it myself, but I don't have Photoshop.

[Muadib]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Amiga DIDN'T FAIL.

If it did, none of us would be talking about it TO THIS DAY.

Exactly!

In the end, one has to take into account that Amiga has become more than just a machine, nowadays it's a community of artists, tinkerers, gamers etc. with a philosophy of the architecture, limitations and creativity of the machine at its core!

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Amiga DIDN'T FAIL.

If it did, none of us would be talking about it TO THIS DAY.

I don't think of the Amiga as a failure. It's more of a question of why it, rather than say the Mac, didn't become the viable alternative to the PC or why it didn't take off the way the Mac and PC did given how superior it was in many respects.

I read other articles by the author TEG mentioned and they are pretty compelling (at least to me). I do disagree that it was a 1990s computer in 1985. I love multitasking (I was an OS/2 guy) and the Amiga GUI and its other capabilities. But the resolution issue was a show stopper for doing work on for most people and it was too expensive to be a mass market home computer.

Today, the Amiga lives on through us who loved the Amiga and its potential at the time. Even as an OS/2 guy, I don't run OS/2 on some emulator or whatever because as much as I loved OS/2, it doesn't spark the imagination like the Amiga did. And I don't run Amiga in emulation, I run the real thing.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Frogs

I read other articles by the author TEG mentioned and they are pretty compelling (at least to me). I do disagree that it was a 1990s computer in 1985. I love multitasking (I was an OS/2 guy) and the Amiga GUI and its other capabilities. But the resolution issue was a show stopper for doing work on for most people

You keep saying that, but it doesn't make sense. The Apple-II was hugely successful before IBM released the PC. Its highest resolution (with an expensive addon card) was worse than the Amiga. The PC was initially offered only with CGA, the same resolution (but a much smaller color palette) as an NTSC Amiga. Tandy's IBM clone range was hugely successful, and it only did CGA.

The real 'show stopper', as everyone knows, was lack of IBM compatibility - which affected every alternative platform that was developed. Apple was less affected only because Microsoft ported its flagship business products to the Mac (actually they made Excel for the Mac first), which gave it a degree of acceptability in the business world.

But even if the Amiga was IBM compatible, why would any business buy one when it was full of stuff they didn't need? Imagine this alternate universe scenario:- Commodore - being run by marketing geniuses - adds a high resolution text mode and full IBM compatibility to the Amiga from day one. It now becomes a PC clone with optional multitasking OS and multimedia features. Millions of people buy it due to Commodore's brilliant marketing and aggressive pricing - but most never use the Amiga features so software support never takes off. Commodore soon realizes this and replaces the Amiga bits with 'standard' PC stuff. By 1989 the things Amiga fans loved are gone for good, and their 'Amiga' is no different to any other PC clone.

[...and it was too expensive to be a mass market home computer.

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.

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

@lmimmfn

Like this?

Haha, this is brilliant, some minor tidyup and seriously would be a great seller, i want one.

[Frogs]

@Bruce, maybe I should say visual clarity as that's more accurate. Because after all, it's not like the Mac had substantially higher resolution. But because it was monochrome, its visuals had a high degree of clarity.

The lack of IBM compatibility in 1985 was not what kept it from being a huge hit in 1985. It was just that in 1985, you really couldn't do very much useful with an Amiga that would appeal to a reasonably sized market.

One can look at how many units the Mac sold from 85 to 89 and see the difference. The Mac was capable of doing things better than the Amiga (Desktop publishing and graphics design) that appealed to a larger segment of the market that was willing to pay the money to buy the Mac than the segment of the market willing to pay for the features that the Amiga was good at during this period.

In 89, I ended up going with an IBM clone (286-10 AT) with a 50MB hard drive because it was simply better than the Amiga in all the areas that mattered to me. VGA graphics (640x480 with sharp graphics) with Windows 2.1 meant I could do things like use Page Maker, Word Perfect, Corel Draw, Matlab, and lots of other things I needed at the time. And I could still run games like Simcity quite well. The Amiga of that period wasn't capable of doing this. ECS wouldn't even come out for another year.