Reply 340 of 426, by brostenen
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LunarG wrote on 2021-04-25, 12:48:brostenen wrote on 2021-04-25, 08:08:Another factor is that the bosses at Commodore did not really understand, that 10 years ahead, means that you need something new […]
Warlord wrote on 2021-04-25, 02:13:It's usually not about trying to compete with open standards. In Amigas case we'll give them the benefit of a doubt its becasue they couldn't just use open source hardware and the only solution was to build something from scratch. These days if you did these kinds of things you would be Apple and in that case its about trying to lock competitors out of their platforms and lock end users into your support chain and your products only. I doubt anything Amiga at the time was doing was this dubious. They simply needed something that worked with heir design and nothing was available. At the time Amiga was really hey lets build a next gen arcade machine in a computer and since its a computer it can be way more than that.
Superior buses aside, with open standards at the time you wouldn't just program games and software that would only take advantage of the best hardware at the time, you would make it run on anything, which is one of the reasons PCs were so far behind amigas, by the time open hardware had surpassed Amiga and general standards got a lot better Amiga would of needed to either embrace newer standards or do complete redesign to keep up. This is the problem with closed standards.
For Amiga to survive it really wasn't about eisa as much as they needed a way of running X86 which amigas didn't do.
Another factor is that the bosses at Commodore did not really understand, that 10 years ahead, means that you need something new that are 10 years ahead once competition catches up. Else consumers will feel let down when it does not happen again.
They had plenty of time, and they wasted it on what? A few stop gaps here and there. And the engineers and hardware devellopers at Commodore knew this and yet the bosses canned project right and left.
I see Doom and other first gen FPS, as the definitive nail in the coffin. At least we got some nice hardware.
One of the problems Commodore had, was that the bosses wanted a repeat of the C64 success. A cheap, simple system that sold like bottled water in the Sahara. The folks who actually designed the Amiga wanted to make a serious computer. If, when after the Amiga was released, the engineers had been given the opportunity to focus on developing serious computers, i.e. improve the custom chipset, design future architecture etc, then it's very likely that they could have challenged IBMs reign. However, the bosses spread their resources too thin and work on too many projects. Flops such as the CDTV were among the few that actually hit the market, and it drained the company of resources.
A Commodore that had focused all their efforts on making the Amiga a successful workstation computer would have been much more competitive, despite the success of the A500 etc. Neither the ECS or AGA were anything near what the engineers had originally planned to/wanted to make.
True.... The engineers at Commodore had so many plans, however they were dictated by a bunch of bosses and board members that knew nothing and saw Commodore as their personal piggy bank as well. That is why we never saw stuff like AAA, machines like NYX and so on. Like they started to plan AAA back in 1988, and if they had focused on that instead of projects like CDTV, C64gs and a600, then they might have sold AAA systems around 1990. If that was the case, then theoretically we would have had Hombre by 1994/96'ish. But in usual Commodore fascion and ways, engineering and devellopment were downsized. There are so many stories, that people in the management up at the top, suddenly realised that they needed something. Then they would see if the engineers had anything that could be sold as something exciting. Those at the top did not know anything, and when they finally had ideas on their own, then it was so disconnected from what users wanted, that it just failed commercially. CDTV, C64gs, Amiga500+ and Amiga600 are stuff that just failed. Another example is the A570 drive. Like WTF? Dicontinuing the Amiga500, replacing it with the Amiga600 and then push a CD drive for Amiga500 at the same time as CDTV fails? What gives?
If Commodore had listened more close to what customers and their engineers wanted. Then they would have survived longer. Eventually they would fail, unless they had moved into x86 territory fully and sold Win9x machines instead. Custom chips, the Amiga way, are just not suited for todays computing landscape. I mean. You just do not see any such in the x1000 and x5000 boards as well.
EDIT:
And what braino came up with the idea of wasting resources on a new 8bit machine, meant to be sold and made money from, back in 1990/91. Like.... 1990/91? That was a stupid thing to waste money on. On the flip side, we now have that MEGA65 machine because of somebody's stupid ressource draining idea back then. So in terms of vintage computing today, it was a nice machine. However in terms of Commodores survuval, then it was really stupid. Clearly they did not learn from sales figures of the C128.
Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....
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