Commodore's Bankruptcy: 20th Anniversary

[wanderer]

It's 20 years today - April 29th 1994.


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[Leffmann]

I hope Medhi Ali had a really horrible Easter.

[Specksynder]

Was it a real bankruptcy? I still don't understand what happened at that time. I think someone helped the PC's victory against Commodore. They invested lots of money for improving hardware but people kept using Amiga anyway. Then, all at once, the failure. Mmm someone doesn't tell it right

[gimbal]

Amiga's don't break. That was the downfall of Commodore I tell you, they didn't build their stuff to break down X months after the warranty expires.

[Leffmann]

Originally Posted by Horace

Was it a real bankruptcy? I still don't understand what happened at that time. I think someone helped the PC's victory against Commodore. They invested lots of money for improving hardware but people kept using Amiga anyway. Then, all at once, the failure. Mmm someone doesn't tell it right

A series of poor business decisions. One of them was to build loads of A600s instead of A1200s.

For some reason, Mehdi Ali didn't want to buy enough AGA chipsets from their manufacturer, and consequently Commodore could only build some ten thousand AGA machines for christmas, as part of a quota of hundreds of thousands of machines that were slated to be built.

Mehdi Ali's decision then was that instead of ordering more chipsets, build as many A1200s as there were chipsets for, and build A600s to fill the rest of the quota immediately, resulting in a huge inventory of unsold A600s.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by Leffmann

Mehdi Ali's decision then was that instead of ordering more chipsets, build as many A1200s as there were chipsets for, and build A600s to fill the rest of the quota immediately, resulting in a huge inventory of unsold A600s.

That would've been only a stopgap solution.

PCs were retaking ground by the beginning of the 90s, and the Amiga needed a significant facelift to jump ahead again.

Cancelling projects like the A3000+ and the other bleeding-edge Amigas was the real death of Commodore.

They also systematically refused to put more powerful hardware in their basic configs. The A1200 could've hugely benefitted by having 4MB of FAST Ram onboard and a 68030.

I'm not entirely sure about how much the cost would've blasted up by adding those things, but one thing's for certain, the Amigas weren't cheap at the beginning of the 90s, and adding another hundred to it to have an hugely powerful (for the time) system would've been the right thing to do.

And AGA wasn't that good of an upgrade. The PCs with their VGA cards did a LOT more by 1990-1991 (higher resolutions, more colors...).

Acutiator/Hombre should've came around 1992 in place of the A1200 to save Commodore... but who am I kidding - even if it did the management would just f'ed up that too

[Predseda]

A sad anniversary.

[stevsurv]

R.I.P.

Hey but its still alive here at EAB!