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Clues That Apple's Bought Another Processor Design House
According to Ars Technica: "Apple's gigantic bankroll may be burning a hole in its pocket. Almost two years after purchasing PowerPC designer P.A. Semi, Apple appears to have snapped up ARM design house Intrinsity. According to a report that first appeared on electronista, a number of engineers at the company have indicated that they are now or soon will be employed by Apple. Some of them have even gone as far as to change their LinkedIn profiles, with one reverting it, possibly out of fear of drawing the wrath of his new, secretive employer." Updated 20100404 1:15 GMT Brian Dipert points out the earlier coverage at EDN, from which both of the above reports draw.
I wonder how long it'll take the otherwise intelligent geeks at /. to finally figure out that Apple is just as dangerous as Microsoft. They (Apple) just haven't gotten to the market share level they need yet to take over the world as it were.
I know I'll get modded down by all the Jobs Koolaid drinkers, but Apple is every bit as hungry and willing to use any means necessary to dominate as is Microsoft. MS is on the wane while Apple is on the rise. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Ya know, say what you will about Microsoft, Apple, Google etc... they are doing what businesses do and people are willing to pay or sacrifice freedom and/or privacy for what they offer. They got there because of marketing. I don't understand people who gripe about someone or something more successful or powerful than they are and/or what they support. If you're have the energy and insight to gripe, use that energy to find a solution - here's mine! Why not push for hardware manufacturers to not only provide open source drivers, but also put Tux right on the box as Linux compatible? Hell, why not build hardware specifically for Linux that can be used with other operating systems? Maybe I'm too much of a "noob" to really know what I'm talking about here, but it makes sense to me. You build it, they will come.
possibly be any more slanted? I'm no Apple fanboy. I've never owned any Apple products and don't like the way Apple does business, nor their history of employee relations, but come on. Claiming someone "possibly" changed their LinkedIn profile due to fear of Apple is out of line.
It's nothing more than rank speculation. If fear of Apple--use of intimidation against the engineers by Apple is implied--was the motivation for changing a LinkedIn profile why didn't the rest of the engineers change their profiles back? Was Apple capable of intimidating only one out of several engineers? Are the majority of the engineers too stupid to know what Apple is like?
The slant taken by this story assumes way too many facts not in evidence.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
I loved my //e
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
MS was dangerous to the competitive Operating System market - and later on, office software.. geeks acknowledged the danger as systems like OS/2 disappeared despite their popularity.
if Apple is a competitive threat, its to the makers of media players and to the producers of content, due to their homogenising influence on the market and their major-media-outlet status. Its less likely to directly affect us....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
they are doing what businesses do and people are willing to pay or sacrifice freedom and/or privacy for what they offer.
There is something terribly wrong with the world where you must sacrifice anything other than money in order to buy products/services.
What happened to "legal tender for all debts, public and private"?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I have a company. It makes money and pays the bills and salaries. But I was always a rebel. Every company ultimately exists to earn profit, it functions for its costs plus profit margin, profitable accounting, and does things to that objective. Unfortunately that often leads to not so good for humanity in general, but great things for the company -- all PR and rationalizations aside. Many of us have said "I don't want to do this, I just don't see an alternative, and I want to keep the job." Either you conform, and get paid and rewarded as part of the "famiglia", or you rebel, and become an outcast, and earn little, or nothing. Art, justice, principles and nature don't make money. Products that become garbage do. If you have a job, you do what you're paid for - and that is not to think and question and create revolution in society, or the company. Apple and Google are companies, as Microsoft and IBM. Monopoly is good for the company, the objective, the earnings. Perhaps they preach "capitalism-light" or "capitalism with a heart and brain", but at the end of the day, the primary purpose must prevail, or they convert to an NGO, or an association of engineers, or go under and dissolve. Real change of the purpose and motivation would mean changing society, the financial system, the work-rewarding system, the motivation given to all of society, the social psychology.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
OSX will build on ARM without a problem and the ARM CPU would be better than the Intel Atom in a netbook.
However, as the world inside the Reality Distortion Field now knows, netbooks will never sell because no one really wants them and anyway, as a failed product, they have been replaced by the magical iPad.
Ideally, you are reading this post a) on your iPhone or b) while waiting in line to buy your Really Big iPhone.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I wonder who the employees are going to put as their employer on their resumes! This whole "can't name my employer" sounds like a bit of BS to me. Also wouldn't APPLE have to do some filing with the SEC regarding the purchase of a design house? It's not exactly the same as buying a stapler!
It may not make a lot of sense for a computer company to buy a microprocessor company. The microprocessor company will lose clients that are competitors of the computer company, the microprocessor will lose market share, and the computer company will find itself with processors that only it has, which are not supported elsewhere. Unless of course it has visions of magnificent grandiosity, unlimited inventiveness capability, inventing chips and computers that nobody else can, selling products nobody has ever imagined. Apple is one of few companies which design computer architectures, along with Intel, and IBM perhaps, which make their own chips, so maybe they are foreseeing becoming more of a competitor of Intel. It wouldn't be their first crazy move.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Can somebody please explain what is evil about Apple buying Intrinsity?
I see. Anyone at Slashdot that doesn't believe that Apple is the new Microsoft (despite marketshare, history, and product differences) and that doesn't find Apple's products to be mediocre is a Koolaid drinker and fanboi.
Just about the most irrational and blinkered topic on Slashdot in years, this Apple emergence. A broad swath of Slashdotters (presumably the last/youngest wave of those that felt special just for being well-versed in technoesoterics) clearly feels their identities and statuses deeply threatened by the (relative) success of Apple, who is having influence out of all proportion to their marketshare as a result of the fact that much of the public finds them to be a tremendous innovative and specifically NON-Microsoft-alike company.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Please see my post in yesterday's anti-Apple party for a discussion of why your'e wrong.
I owned other phones with touch screens for years before buying an iPhone. The user interface makes it substantively different.
I owned a Creative MuVo2 and a Diamond Rio before an iPod (which I no longer own, replacing it with my iPhone). The user interface made it substantively different.
I keep an installation of Mac OS X 10.5.8 on a ThinkPad partition for cases when I need to run Mac apps for compatibility with someone's files. The user interface makes it substantially different.
I owned a Fujitsu Stylistic, a Vadem Clio, an Asus R2H, and most recently a Toshiba M200, all tablet PCs. Having seen the iPad demoed and used the iPhone for some time, it is clear that the user interface will make the iPad substantively different.
The user interface is perhaps the single most important substantive component of the computing experience, yet posters like you routinely pretend as if it isn't even there.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
That might be indeed what Apple tries to achieve, except that it doesn't work that way in the industry.
There are always leader and wannabes. But long-time leader seldom lose it to newcomers. It's too late for Apple to dominate the market.
Generally, what happens is a disruptive shift of paradigms, of what matters the most, which makes the stronghold of the previous king obsolete, and helps a completely new market arise with its own new kings.
IBM used to be the top of the heap in term of big iron hardware. Other companies wanted to be "the new IBMs" but never succeeded.
Instead, with the arrival of the PC (ironically by IBM themselves !) hardware stopped to be the most important element. Hardware became a commodity, and what started to matter was the software. Big mainframe from big name brand left their place free to a world of beige-box built out of random noname components. IBM didn't matter anymore, because software could be run anywhere (at least on any PC-clone built from Asian knock-off parts).
This enabled Microsoft to rise (using its dubious tactics) as the quasi-monopoly of software. The new IBM wasn't a new hardware monopoly, but a software one.
Currently there are a lot of "Microsoft-wannabes". But none of them will reach software monopoly. Ever.
What will happen, what is happening currently, is another shift of paradigm. With the rise of Internet, we start to see strong need for interoperability, which in turn brings standards. Former vendor software lock-in won't work that great in a decade when even the mythical "internet-enabled-fridge" has to be HTML5-compliant.
And thus, slowly, software stops to matter. As long as it is standards-compliant, and let you surf, mail and chat (in a way compatible with the rest of the internet) the OS and the software isn't important anymore. The widespread use Linux is having in the embed and handhelds world and its recent success with netbooks are both a testimony of that. Microsoft won't matter, because people can access the web and cloud-based activity, and can open standard-compliant data out of any software they choose or happens to come with their hardware (as long as said software is compliant).
The next battle won't be fought between Microsoft wannabes. The next battle won't be about software monopoly.
The next battle will be about data and online service. This battle will be fought between Google, Facebook, and the likes. It will see its new kings (my bet on Google), and its new hard-to-enter-into monopolies (today, its nearly impossible to begin competing against Google on the search engine front. And its impossibly hard to create a new huge social network, because Facebook is where everyone is and they don't want to interoperate much).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
1. Regular people like Apple products.
2. But Apple products have nice user interfaces and can be used by most anyone.
3. Therefore they are like a totalitarian dictator marching the unwashed masses to their graves.
4. Plus they're just sexy, not real.
5. Therefore, anything Apple does is evil.
6. And anyone that doesn't think so is a blinded member of the politburo or a metrosexual fashionista.
7. Plus, OSX sucks and is just like Windows, iPod sucks and is just like Zune, iPhone sucks and is just like Blackberry, and iPad sucks and is just like Microsoft tablet PC.
8. 1337 H4x0rs Ru13!
I think I covered everything.
Seriously, the walled garden property sucks and I'd love to be able to use a bluetooth keyboard with my iPhone without unlocking it. But the Apple hate around the online tech world is truly a sphere of irrationality to behold right now, out of any proportion to anything anyone has done; Microsoft and Microsoft users were never even talked about this way.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If Apple had become the dominant IT company, if it hadn't screwed up like everyone else with the PC and allowed Wintel to completly own the industry, then we might have been even worse off.
But that didn't happen. All the lock-in, proprietary, sneakiness of Apple is "mostly harmless". It sucks if it bites you in the ass, but the rest of the world isn't affected.
And that makes all the difference. Apple is a big player in PC's but it got lots of healthy competition and this means that if I don't like the crap that they pull with their display connector, I don't have to like it. Plenty of other PC/laptop makers around.
Now Apple is becoming more powerful, you can see this with the sudden ditching of flash with the coming of the iPad. And that could be bad... give me a minute, got to come up with a reason the painful agonizing and humiliating death of flash is a bad thing... anyone?
Well, it is not bad in itself, but it shows just how powerful a company can become. A techonolgy that was used widely, that you couldn't get rid of with endless security holes and browsers consuming 100% cpu, GONE because a company releases a single product that might still bomb (yeah right). That is pause for thought. What if this extends? What if Apple becomes so powerful it can stop the acceptance of USB 3.0 (Its laptop range still does not support), or a new CPU range (Again, its laptops are still on the ancient Core 2 Duo).
Would Apple have created OSX if it wasn't the underdog? Would it have pulled an IE6 and just kept its old crap around with no development because they owned the market? Maybe.
I for one think that healthy competition is good, so next time you blindly buy an iThingy because everyone buys one, remember what might happen if EVERYONE buys iThingies just because everyone does.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I do wonder what exactly one thinks Apple is looking to control beyond their devices and the user experience of those devices? As far as I can tell, the only evil Apple does is in their desire to control the use of those devices once they've been sold. I see no evidence that Apple seeks to dominate the entire media landscape, nor whole computer market. Apple is in the business of making the "best" devices possible - no more, no less. The control freakery is all about producing superb, useful products.
Of course there are knock-on effects in some areas and Apple isn't terribly interested in being anyone's partner. Nevertheless, every day I appreciate the user-focused design of their devices.
I do however miss their maker/creator-centric perspective regarding the iPhone (and presumably the iPad). Still, my iPhone is an indispensable navigation/information/communication tool when I'm out and about (I live in London and whenever I travel beyond the M25, O2 do a pretty good job so I can always figure out where I am and where I need to go).
So Apple will dominate the non-crap devices and Apple market, right? Sounds ok to me and very much in the spirit of free-market capitalism.
Sitting on a bus back from the airport the other night almost every person (across a wide age range) had a smartphone. 90% of them were iPhones.
Hm. Another piece of anecdotal evidence. But please, remember, the US isn't the world. The iPhone has a minuscule share of the world's mobile phone market. The only sense in which Apple "made" the smartphone market is by manipulating the tech press to redefine the smartphone as an iPhone. Remember the false dichotomy that Apple insisted existed between the Mac and the PC. More of the same. And so, by definition, the Mac is the best Mac, and the iPhone is the best iPhone.
I think people really need to look closer at what is in Apples products and how they relate to products sold by Apple "now". The CPU in the iPhone is an ARM Cortex cpu supplied by Samsung but guess who is the joint developer of the cpu, yep you got it Intrinsity. What Apple are doing here is making sure they can control the technology under the hood of their products no more no less. It is a good business decision and also makes sure they don't have any legal (patents) problems down the road.
...and I don't see the tie-down anywhere other than the normal situation of not being able to run native apps on other platforms.
When you see a non-Apple program unable to browse an internal work website because it doesn't have the right Apple voodo, then drop us a datagram. Until then, you'd better keep your eye on how MS is trying to expand this common office situation to the wider Internet by making their Son-of-Active Directory the defacto protocol for single sign-on to websites.
Apple's biggest threat to date is actually the iPad, because if they get the tablet form factor to take off and supplant personal computers, it will be with a closed iPhone-like architecture which is much worse in terms of freedom than having a tablet Mac.
You thought Microsoft was evil. Well Steve Jobs is the devil himself.
Jim Blomgren's profile now says "I also work for Apple on April 1 :-)"... I think people have gotten a little excited over not much...
People, take a quick bunny hop through List of cognitive biases and ask yourself how many of these constitute cognitive feeder arteries for Godwin's law.
Every so often a topic comes up where everyone simultaneously decides to let their amygdalas off the leash in the same dog park, who all quickly pair up for a circular open-jaw square dance. After the dust settles, what do you have? A giant patch of lawn to circumvent until the next heavy rainfall.
I suppose the game is a bit more earnest for the born complainer, who does have to somehow realign the pole of supreme evil with every successive regime change. Those of us with the attention span to get through the first page of Anna Karenina understand that evil has a multitude of poles, any one of which can erupt into the supreme pimple in the rapidly shifting context of real life.
if anybody shakes MS loose from that, my bet would be Google rather than Apple
Apparently, slashdotters don't read Swift, either.
There are at least half a dozen major players tugging on different fingers of the Beast of Redmond. Sony is doing their ineffective best tugging on the pinky finger with their once-powerful PS3 franchise. The unholy alliance Snoracle has a firm but limp-wristed grasp on the middle finger on office suite revenue streams. Linux/Apache/Firefox inflicted a hairline fracture on a wristbone. Google extracted a fingernail from the ring finger when it became the ultimate talent drain. That had to hurt. And now they're proceeding to bend back the index finger by sucking up the air supply in online search. Learn from the best. A horsefly named Gnome Evolution landed on the thumb and carted off the largest divot of flesh it could manage, which considering all the other wounds, is of no real consequence whatsoever, unless horseflies are a vector for Ebola, and so far it appears that they aren't. All things considered, I think that Microsoft can hang there by their relatively undamaged, enterprising thumbs for another thirty years or so.
The biggest risk with Apple is that they manage to leverage their carefully cultivated charisma (if it survives their having become a big enough company to matter in these discussions) to make DRM palatable to the masses.
Sony is far more evil in the DRM department (witness the recent "other OS" rescindment fiasco) but they suffer from a bad case of cartoon evil: whatever their grasping ambition, it's soon equally matched by their incompetence. They managed--on the back of a half billion dollar war chest--to leverage their dominant Play Station franchise into a slow and lukewarm victory in a dying physical media platform.
This rivals anything accomplished by the Hudson Bay Company (oldest corporation in North America) which once laid claim to half the natural resources in Canada, but decided the crown jewel was retailing dress shirts. If Warren Buffett had gained control of HBC in the late 1700s, America might now be the 11'th Canadian province, or an economic protectorate, like Puerto Rico. (If BG gained control of the HBC in the late 1700s, Russia would now be the world's great democracy and white knight of freedom.)
Wish the Sony/HBC disease were true of Apple, but it isn't.
I could continue grave digging in this vein for another day or two, but hey, it's Easter, and whatever your opinion on the back story, there was an important lesson in there about the rush to judgement.
the microprocessor will lose market share, and the computer company will find itself with processors that only it has, which are not supported elsewhere.
Well, that's not going to happen with the current buy, because :
- ARM is an architecture used by lots of chip makers, almost everywhere. Apple is just buying one of the numerous chip maker which make ARM-based chips.
- Even if it was a separate architecture, it won't matter. Apple want to make cheap chips to put into its iPhone/iPods/iPad, they'll compile their own software for it. It doesn't matter if that architecture doesn't run Wolrd of Warcraft, that was never the intention.
so maybe they are foreseeing becoming more of a competitor of Intel.
Apple's point is not to compete with intel. Their target is not to have a line of "Apple CPUs" that poeple built their desktop machine around. You're never going to see "Apple" as a 3rd brand, beside Intel and AMD.
Their goal is just to have their own stable supply of chips for their devices. Currently they source their chips from a 3rd party : Texas Intrument's OMAPs. Thus, if they want access to a new generation of technology (like ARM Cortex A9 CPU or a PowerVR SGX 540 GPU), they are at the mercy of TI's choices to release new product. And TI currently target mobile market only, they provide OMAP 44x0 for mobilephone markets, but only plan to release 45x0 later this year for Netbooks, embed and other smaller scale projects. Or same goes if they needed higher clocked Cortex A8 based chips, etc.
That's why they had a custom "Apple A4" made for their iPad, and that's why they are buying an ARM designing shop.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well, that depends if you mean the personal computer as a generic concept- which existed for a number of years before IBM released theirs- or the later meaning of the term "PC" as "IBM PC compatible".
No, I really specifically meant IBM's PC machine.
But IBM only released *their* PC a number of years after others had done so already, and it was clear that they weren't going away.
Yes. Small machine targeted at individuals have existed before the PC.
The huge difference: all these previous machine were either home-made kits or small proprietary series.
IBM's PC was the first which :
- had a large scale success (thank to the IBM name written on it)
- was opened-up (probably because the initial intent from IBM was to make it easy for 3rd party to create compatible peripherals) and ended up being more a platform than a specific machine from a specific constructor.
- thanks to the 2 above (and efforts from Pheonix BIOS to provide an alternative for the last non-open part), a whole ecosystem of cheap no-name clones arose.
- Thanks to all 3 above, the whole platform met a gigantic success, becoming the "de-facto standard", controlled by no single corporation in particular, to run your softwares on it (and the monopolist role migrated to software thanks to microsoft piggy backing with the whole MS-DOS scam).
There were a lot of other personal machines at the same time. But they were all proprietary and not open.
Sure, as you point out, they were "IBM" and part of their success was due to this.
But in the end, if the PC won against the Amigas and Atari ST, it was not because of superior qualities or capabilities.
It was because Commodore and Atari weren't only battling against IBM, but against Compaq, and countless of other clone makers, all trying to sell their clones cheaper than the concurrence.
And I think too that the whole result were accidental for IBM.
I only suspect different motives: not that IBM was playing catch-up with the other personal computer manufacturer, but that they envisioned their PC as a glorified terminal, a client to connect to the enterprise mainframe (which will definitely happen to have an IBM stamp on it).
That's probably why they chose to go for an inferior architecture (8086 and 8088 at an era when 16/32 processors like the 68k were starting to appear) and a rather limited OS (so the PC doesn't pose a menace to their "big brain" business) designed (stolen) by an idiot who couldn't properly plan memory mapping for the next decade.
And that's why they probably choose to make their architecture more open and were tolerant toward clone : their core business was mainframe and in the end it shouldn't matter that much who produces the terminal, as long as it connects to their big iron. (and why not let the IBM brand associate with the brain and the clone name only with the "glorified terminal" dumb machine ?)
Only the history happened slightly differently.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
My best friend from high school has worked at Intrinsity since I-don't-know-when; I'd hope he'd have enough stock+options to make him happy (not that he lacks for money, but it's always nice when good things happen to good people).
And they run a pretty tight ship, because I never knew what the heck he was working on, until the public announcement of their ARM work.
I worked there briefly years ago back when they were EVSX. EVSX was in turn founded by folks from the Austin branch of Exponential Technologies, which ironically was a company based around making fast processors for the Apple clone market of the 90s (for extra irony given Apple's years-later switch to intel cpus, exponential tech apparently worked both in PowerPC and x86, with Austin focusing on the x86 branch of development). In a sense, this acquisition is kind of like full circle for the company. I wish them all the best; they are an extremely bright and friendly group who were great to work with. I ended up leaving for a job paying slightly more with less commute, but ultimately I wish I'd stayed on as the people were better to work with at EVSX.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Digital Research, the company which made CP/M 86, that DOS was a clone of.
For example,
That analogy is extremely flawed. Microsoft is not at fault because Corel doesn't port Wordperfect to Mac, and your office environment insists on using Wordperfect. Your office is locked into Wordperfect.
It decided the best tool for the job was Wordperfect, and Microsoft was not the company that decided whether or not Wordperfect would be supported on Mac. For many years, many artists, publishers, and graphic designers worked on Macs instead of under Windows because that's where the better tools were. Did that mean Apple locked them into the Mac platform? Of course not!
I have a lot of criticism for Microsoft, however that doesn't mean I'm going to turn a blind eye to Apple. What frightens me about Apple is the trend of less consumer control over what they can do on their own devices and developers being required to meet secret and fickle standards (sometimes which change retroactively) in order to have their work distributed in the sole distribution channel for the platform.
the time it took for a debate that sort of looked interesting to turn into the good ole MS v. Apple fight.
I wonder if we shouldn't create a special award (a bit like the Godwin points) for the fastest to troll on our usual preferred /. topics. There's quite a few if you think about it!
MS v. Apple
Windows v. Mac OS X v. Linux v. xBSD v. other OSes
vi v. Emacs (when everybody knows Emacs rules anyway =)
...
I'm not clear on what you mean by "small proprietary series"
Yup, sorry. I don't express myself clearly. What I wanted to say is that other personal computer were :
- Small series = Not the massive amount of unit that the various IBM models (and later clones) shipped. Of course the IBM name helped a lot, even against the overrated price.
- Proprietary series = Most machine produced by other constructors were "one-of-a-kind" models. Usually they ran only software designed for it.
Software for C64, runs on C64 only.
Software for Apple II runs on Apple II only, etc.
Where as software written for the PC work on any IBM of that series, as it does on the numerous clones of it.
the Apple II was definitely a personal computer (one of the first) rather than the hobbyist kit machines that had preceded it, and that came out in 1977, four years before the IBM PC.
..but ran only Apple II software. And was only available from Apple (in the west, at least).
The next mass-marketed success you mention, the C64, was from a different company and completely incompatible.
With the PC, each new machine or clone ran the same stuff as the rest of the family no matter who the constructor is (if there's even 1 single constructor, that is. Later on, a given machine could have even been an eclectic mix of parts assembled into a beige box in a small computer-shop)
But back to the point- yeah, the IBM PC's unintentional openness ultimately transformed the market, but that wasn't what sold it initially, and one might question whether the market wouldn't have moved towards such a model anyway.
Based on specs only ? No, of course, it was a piece of crap.
Based on fact that later you could pick any clone from any vendor and still run the same software ? Sure ! People like cheap.
(That also one of the reason I think Android will probably become a dominant plat-form, once it stabilise a bit : you'd be able to pick up cheap android phone from dozens of no-name asian constructors and still run the same apps and the same environment as the original one)
For example, the mid-80s MSX format was an attempt by primarily Japanese companies to agree on a standard. (It probably flopped in the US and the UK because the 8-bit market was already well-established with proprietary standards; e.g. C64 and ZX Spectrum- MSX was just another format).
But still in Asia MSX worked well. It became a dominant standard which was targeted by many developers and offered by many constructors. (lots of video games that the west discovered on 8bit platform such as the NES started their lives on MSX computers : Puyo-puyo, Metal Gear, Bomberman, or had important MSX ports like Castle Vania, Final Fantasy, etc.)
The same happened in the eastern block with Apple II clones such as the (bulgarian made) Pravetz (poor IP laws there meant it was easy to mass market Apple clones by numerous vendors).
In fact the reason the PC succeeded is that the west lacked an actual uniform standard. As you said : C64 and ZX were proprietary standards (MSX didn't win, also because it didn't offer anything better than the proprietary and in fact had some short-comings. You had to have a new 16bit standard with a big brand name to beat them, just like now you needed a Firefox packed with features to beat IE).
Also, the eastern block with success of Apple clones showed what could have happened if Apple let a clone market develop. (Apple would have been "the personnal computer" of the west).
It was also because those companies marketed the computers very badly. The Amiga in particular was perfectly capable of functioning as a high-quality business computer- and indeed, the features that it had that the mid-80s PCs didn't, such as pre-emptive multitasking, a proper GUI (albeit one that wasn't as slick as Apple's) and fantastic graphics- are ones that are now essential to an
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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