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The Return of the Commodore?
PseudoSapien writes "A Dutch consumer media company is hoping it can tap the power of the VIC 20, the PET and the Commodore 64 to launch a new wave of products, including a home media center device and a portable GPS (Global Positioning System) unit and media player. They're talking about Resurrecting Commodore." From the article: "Commodore is far from the first company to try to revive a once-popular tech brand. The Amiga, Commodore's onetime PC brand, has had its own decades-long history as fans tried to preserve both the computer's operating system and brand despite the lack of strong corporate backing."
Some Dutch company bought rights to use the commodore name and logo and is stamping it on some Chinese made OEM products?
Can't we just let the dead rest in peace anymore? I loved both my C=64 and my Amiga, but they're history. This is just marketing/branding, it has nothing to do with the original products, nor it's spirit.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Just don't publish programs in magazines. That really was a painful and stupid way to distrubute software.
:) I did, and also happened to learn a lot in the process.
It also happened to be the only viable way to distribute software, economically atleast. But hey, atleast running software you spent hours transcribing was rewarding
So... This isn't Commodore, they aren't using old Commodore tech, they're just hoping that people are going to buy something because of the name.
I doubt this will work very well. Once people realise the association is fake, the products had better be very good, or else people will be angry that their good memories have been compromised, and they will be *less* satisfied than if they'd just bought a Brand Nobody product.
I think it's unlikely the products will be any good, or else they wouldn't have felt the need to tack any brand they could get their hands on as a way to promote them. Think of the ratio of good film tie-in games to bad.
Maybe they will make good use of the name, maybe they have the most wonderful products ever, but they are one wrong step from becoming unwanted graverobbers.
Brand recognition, maybe. People might be more willing to buy a device if it's a Commodore as opposed to $RANDOM_CORPORATION_WE_NEVER_HEARD_ABOUT_BEFORE.
The same thing happened to Amiga, too: just remember the late "Amiga" computers (I'm putting that in quotes on purpose), which really were just standard PCs with AMD processors - but with a hefty price tag.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I stopped reading here.
I don't know what these people are doing with the Commodore name, but whatever it is, it isn't Commodore.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Yea, it was painful, but it was all we had man!
I was about four years old when I first started with the C64, and my mom was a secretary at that time, so she typed the code for a while. It took me a few years to wrap my mind around it, but it was a great way to dissect the language and learn through repitition. But, honestly, I do strongly doubt they'd print complete game/app code in magazines these days!
....No wonder why 'ADD' wasn't a hot issue back then.
Does that surprise you or is it in any way different from 95% of other companies out there today?
Sorry, just irritated that not only is this strategy so widespread, but that it is so effective in the market. Why are people generally more caught up in a brand than the actual product?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Um, just the company that created the single most successful model of computer ever (the C64); had a bunch of other very successful models (the C128, the VIC-20, the PET, the Amiga 2000, the Amiga 500); is generally acknowledged for inventing multimedia (with the Amiga 1000); had switchable GUIs, multiple processors, independent graphics processors, decent (stereo) sound and graphics, and scripting capabilities back before most other computer platforms even thought about such things; had reliably chainable external hardware well before USB; etc. Most of the best programmers I know today started on one of the Commodore series.
He didn't. Tramiel's Atari lost a dirty bidding war with Commodore for Amiga, Inc's technologies. If Atari had won, they would have used the chips to make a new console platform and probably kick out Miner & co.
The guy you want is Mehdi Ali, who along with Irving Gould ran Commodore to the ground as fast as they could. They are ultimately responsible for creating a company that would throw out any real innovation coming out of the engineering department and going for fast bucks instead. No R&D, just cheap crippled products -- that was Commodore in the 90's. They should have started a next-gen Amiga project as soon as they got the A500 on the market, but they didn't. And when Engineering *did* have a brilliant product (the A3000+) it was scrapped. And when Sun would have sold (shitloads of) rebadged A3000's as Unix workstations, the deal fell through because C= thought they could conquer the Unix market themselves. And...
Whatever. Commodore remains one of the great examples of management by idiocy.