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The Real Inside Story of How Commodore Failed (youtube.com)
dryriver writes: Everybody who was into computers in the 1980s and 1990s remembers Commodore producing amazingly innovative, capable and popular multimedia and gaming computers one moment, and disappearing off the face of the earth the next, leaving only PCs and Macs standing. Much has been written about what went wrong with Commodore over the years, but always by outsiders looking in -- journalists, tech writers, not people who were on the inside. In a 34 minute long Youtube interview that surfaced on October 9th, former Commodore UK Managing Director David John Pleasance and Trevor Dickinson of A-EON Technology talk very frankly about how Commodore really failed, and just how crazy bad and preventable the business and tech decisions that killed Commodore were, from firing all Amiga engineers for no discernible reason, to hiring 40 IBM engineers who didn't understand multimedia computing, to not licensing the then-valuable Commodore Business Machines (CBM) brand to PC makers to generate an extra revenue stream, to one new manager suddenly deciding to manufacture in the Philippines -- a place where the man had a lady mistress apparently. The interview is a truly eye-opening preview of an upcoming book David John Pleasance is writing called Commodore: The Inside Story . The book will, for the first time, chronicle the fall of Commodore from the insider perspective of an actual Commodore Managing Director.
Oh how quaint! Did he like to hide in her petticoats?
Did you perhaps mean to type "Hero to Zero"?
usual corporate insanity, with a touch of bad luck
Commodore should really have been "too big to fall/fail". (Seriously, do you know how far up the list of tech companies they were?) Being treated like a private playground probably did not help one iota and aborted any rescue operations.
I hope it was a wake-up call to other big corporations that Moore's Law will bury you if you don't respect it.
You are sick
Eventually got to the Book web site....
https://downtimepublishing.com/
they don't ship to Australia - fuck whats the point cunts
Thanks for the heads-up. I re-read Brian Bagnall's "On the Edge" about once a year which is also a fascinating read.
I pre-ordered with regular shipping to Germany (about 7 quid)
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
Still got my old C64 from the early 80s and it still works, solid reliable hardware. Those days are long gone.
Seriously, is proofreading the title already too much?
There are plenty of psychopaths in corporate management: Perhaps the better story is why their destructive behaviour wasn't stopped. IE: "All that is necessary for evil to triumph, ..."
Apparently they hired an ex IBM boss after Tramiel, who decided they should make PCs, hired a bunch of his friends from IBM and tried to make PCs in a market that was getting swamped by Chinese generic PCs.
Then there was a second chance, which was a licensing deal with a Chinese company, and a malicious German manager scuppered that to favor a German buyer who didn't have the resources to compete. That was the end of it.
I'm reminded of what Elop did to Nokia, the combination of a malicious CEO more loyal to an outside company, and a weak board unwilling to tackle the CEO.
Anyone want to buy an a1200 with an aca1233n, quick before the fires eat my county?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ars Technica published a story on the fall of Commodore as part of their History of Amiga series.
Reading this was a nice trip down memory lane, my first computer was a Commodore 64 and the second one a Commodore Amiga 500.
Personally the Commodore was too limited to ever be successful. By the time C64 became popular the speed of improvements in personal PC was taking off. I remember struggling with finding any really useful and effective ways to use the C64. Really the advent of Windows a very good graphical interface was the biggest advancement in placing PC's in the home. The Commodore 64 simply ended up a hobbyist sort of PC which never attracted mainstream users.
Commodore would never have survived the comodisation and explosion of standard computing and office cimputing. At best it would have stayed a niche at worst it would have imploded as a game machine. See for example the Atari ST plateform, which separated from the tramiel/commodore fiasco, and yet what hapenned in 1993 ? They went the jaguar way and dropped personal machine - only hobbyist continued. That is why I think that while the video shows one side of the problem, this would not have been the end in a normal case, but due to the comodisation of coimnputing to office PC AND the console gamification so that personal computing game plateform could only go the first way (console) or the later (office general machine with games). This is the TRUE reason amiga and comodore failed : they missed the change in early in1990, kept doing those personal gaming machine (yes they were NOT used massively for office stuff) and even if they had done a good machine, they were on the way out anyway.
" Really the advent of Windows a very good graphical interface was the biggest advancement in placing PC's in the home"
The C64 was a home computer. You've head about the Amiga, right? Windows came about years after the Amiga, whose GUI still was a match for anything MS came up with up until Win 3.1 (and even then the Amiga was a proper virtual memory multitasking system unlike the lash up that was Windows until NT came along). The reason the Commodore lost wasn't technology - they were leagues ahead of the PC in software and hardware, it was purely utterly inept management.
They developed a killer product and then sat on their asses doing little to progress it until the competition surpassed them. Not enough investment in R&D, not enough marketing, not enough product refinement.
Actually, quite opposite. A manager ditched the squint-eyes who offered a good contract, and picked the glorious Aryan race (Germans) who at that moment had no means to fulfill the contract.
Yes, that pretty much sums it up.
A company of mine used to develop for the Amiga. We did several different types of software and various bits of hardware. We were quite successful in the Amiga context right up until Commodore folded, at which point we switched to Windows and continued our run for many years. During the Amiga years we used to say:
After the Amiga years, we'd just roll our eyes and twitch a bit.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Little known fact: It was actually a lord mistress.
I had worked with so many company that work this way, from bank to media they all have a mistress that want them to buy a firm to just lay out all the staff to turn the building in a autoignition desaster.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
our leaders are clearly greedy and incompetent, for proof one only need look at the shitty world we live in, thanks largely to their decisions
This one is hard to end up finding even if you're a Commodore guy. The Deathbed Vigil by Dave Haynie is basically a documentary about the last day the Commodore doors were open. It's almost entirely footage shot on-the-spot by Haynie of the staff and what they talked about and had to say during the last day.
If you watch it, you'll find that one of the employees was probably one of the nicest people ever, and even he was on the verge of saying that the head of the company was a piece of shit that was entirely to blame. It was pretty depressing, really. Everything went to hell after Tramiel left and management is entirely to blame. The engineers were the most dedicated people you could get.
I was young at the time, but I remember seeing the fall of Commodore coming a couple of years out. When the Amiga initially came out I did not pay that much attention to it because by that time Commodore had burnt its bridges with too many people in the industry. By the time I learned how good the Amiga was it was obvious that Commodore had either failed to understand why it had such an atrocious reputation in the computing industry or did not know how to change. Commodore as a company was already on life support when it bought Amiga. Amiga brought new life which bought it a few more years, but they never healed the underlying problem which had gotten Commodore into that position in the first place.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
If you are interested in the history of Commodore, and the tour de force that was Jack Tramiel, I'd suggest checking out Brian Bagnall's excellent book, Commodore: A Company on the Edge (https://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/dp/0973864966).
I got it because I had a C-128 growing up, and thought it'd be interesting to read about the history of the company, but it was more than just nostalgia that kept me engaged in the book. It provides a fascinating history of not only Commodore, but the entire computer industry in the late 70s through the 1980s. I particularly liked the backstory of MOS Technology--the chip company behind most of the early home computers.
The author has recently written a follow up: Commodore: The Amiga Years (https://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Amiga-Years-Brian-Bagnall/dp/0994031025), which is on my reading list.
Not that long ago another company came along that bought out the name and was promising slick little PC setups to be available "soon". Then they evaporated into thin air. Anyone know what happened to them? The Wikipedia entry for Commodore 2.0 is not particularly telling.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
There was an big internal battle about whether to split the lines into business computers and consumer computers. Tramiel felt more comfortable competing in the consumer realm, but many top engineers and board members felt the business market had better margins. Tramiel wanted to be a low-cost volume producer instead of the deal with complex higher-end systems. He wanted to crank out mass widgets, not be IBM. After all, that's why the C64 was successful. If low-price-high-volume got you where you are, why change your spots? This battle drained the company's focus.
Another problem is that they didn't initially give much thought to forward compatibility. A lot of software producers relied on undocumented features and glitches to get special effects, tease out speed, or work around design bugs. C64's architecture was designed with price in mind, such as getting a deal on components at the time of first release. Creating a future-friendly architecture was ranked behind such. If the next model didn't recreate these glitches and oddities, the old software wouldn't be compatible. Thus, they had problems engineering a next generation model compatible with C64 software.
They even released a computer with the C64 chip set and a newer chip-set, but it was pretty much 2 different computers in one box, making it more expensive yet not having software for the "new half". It failed. Without compatibility and the software it brings, people would have no reason to get the new model(s). Their price-first past caught up with them.
And third, Commodore was flaky about paying their bills. They built up a bad reputation such that suppliers became pickier about payment schedules and conditions, robbing Commodore of supply flexibility. It's yet another case of short-term thinking catching up. Tramiel's bill-flake reputation followed him to Atari.
Table-ized A.I.
The first commercial computer I owned was a Vic-20. The second one was a C64.
I still consider the C64 to be perhaps the best hobbyist computer ever produced.
Instead of simply voting you down I'll tell you why people don't like this post.
Nobody cares about the things you're talking about here. Even thought your story relates to the lifespan of c64 computers 3 years is an extremely short lifespan for 1980-1990s computer hardware. Particularly when we're talking about commodore hardware
Here is a c64 operating in a polish auto shop, metallic dust and smoke, oil, humidity usually places like this kill machines in under 10 years.
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
Here is one running hvac for a school district
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
So we've all heard legends of long lived commodores. A story like yours just has people wondering how the fuck you killed 3 in a decade!!!
Of course I already know because according to you as soon as you busted your last c64 you went straight over to your roommates brand new 7000 dollar thinkpad from his brand new dream job... and deleted COMMAND.COM.
Meaning that the lifespan of a c64 vs a PC is about 2000x longer which is quite impressive actually. It's just that in the creimer's stubby hands life is short for even the hardiest of computers. Unless you're aware that creimer is a disaster area the story just doesn't make any sense.
I have to admit though. You're getting close and closer to the day when you can hide behind a new sockpuppet and be left in peace. Keep up the good progress!
A while ago I read and enjoyed "On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise And Fall Of Commodore" by Brian Bagnall. He interviewed folks there, etc., to write a history of what went wrong. If I recall, it could be summed up as poor management and an eventual disinterest in running a technical company by the higher manager(s) (i.e., greed only).
You kids aren't going far enough back in time. The biggest mystery in the history of microcomputers is how it is that IBM went with a Microsoft deal rather than making the obvious move of going with CP/M and Digital Research. Microsoft did languages, and had no expertise with Operating Systems-- Gates cut a deal with someone to buy an OS cheap-- and it later turned out to have been a pirated fork of CP/M, Microsoft had to do a re-write later. That got repackaged as MS-DOS, and that's where Gates got the muscle to push Windows and Office and so on... arguing the technical merits of Windows is pretty much besides the point.
This all explains the Microsoft business style-- they lived in terror that someone else would do to them what they'd done to IBM.
Windows was a secondary enemy of C64. DOS PC-clone sales were already eating into C64 sales by the late 1980's. (Windows wasn't big until about 1992. Earlier Windows was too buggy.) While DOS PC's were more expensive, they had more memory and performance than C64; and people used PC's at work, so were familiar with them. C64's architecture is not easy to scale up and stay compatible: it was originally designed with price in mind, not scalability. Thus, Commodore had technical trouble making a beefier C64-compatible machine.
Amiga was solution looking for a problem. It had great multi-media for a relatively decent price, but had no "killer apps" to boost sales. Video and music editing was one of its strengths, but those are a small niche. Eventually desktop-publishing popped-up in the Mac as a big market, but Amiga was too late in fostering desktop publishing (DP) software co's; Macs were already stealing the momentum.
By the time DP software worked well on Amiga, Windows PC's also had DP, and therefore Amiga was squeezed by both Windows and Macs. Macs had the most mature DP software and Windows took the "cheapo" DP market.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm not a fan of the Windows GUI, or GUIs in general, but your un-humble opinion looks like Mac-fanboyism run rampant. Just as an example, the most notable thing about the Mac GUI in that era was when you switched between apps there was often very little visual feedback that you'd done something-- the menu bar across the top of the screen would mutate slighly. Is that supposed to be design genius?
The Windows style of putting the menu bar on the app window was often derided by Mac-fans as being less mouse-friendly (you can over-shoot the menu bar with the mouse, whereas when it's up againt the top of the screen that's not possible)-- but that's an even better argument for not using a mouse, with keyboard alternates you can just do it without checking for over/under shoot... and that era of Windows had pretty good keyboard alternates for everything (they didn't start to lose their way on this until Windows 95, with a File-Open dialog that could take ten minutes of tabbing/backtabbing to use without a mouse).
OS needed rom changes for updates unlike mac that patched the roms in software.
hey look everybody, there's a NEW Zealand now!
you're not fooling anybody... next you'll start going on about dwarves and hobbits...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Somewhere near the first 1/3rd of the interview there is a mention of a new machine that was "totally ahead of it's time". I'd like to say he was talking about the 5000, but I'm not entirely sure.
In any event, does anyone know what this was, and what made it, as he claimed, as good as machines of today's era? Because I call BS on that by default.
And why, oh why, doesn't anyone ever mention Mindset?
Programmers were comfortable with Windows and started treating it like a console, hacking every last bit of performance for crazier god-like features. The problem is, Windows wasn't meant to be a fixed constant like a console, so there was always this tug of war between the OS and the third parties. That's a big reason why Microsoft went to the secure NT kernel for consumers.
On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore, does an excellent job at detailing the Commodore story. Basically, Commodore was a product company seeking to maximize current profits without planning for the future. It had no one to lead it into the future. Jack Tramiel got lucky with the 64 and really did not have the vision to move the company forward and Irving Gould, the company's controlling shareholder did not care. All he wanted was to maximize his initial investment.
The good example of this is how the Commodore 128 was created. An engineer inside commodore took on the project and basically design the machine by himself. He did what he wanted with little input from others. Basically it was a hack. A great example that exemplifies this is the addition of CP/M . The engineer thought it was a cool easy addition. The fact that no one asked for it was beside the point.
Commodore is a good example of how not to run a company for the long haul.
I found it funny you using the "it's a console. BAD!" argument when clearly it works well into 2017.
The Amiga Forever discs has the videos and some other historic material.
Simply put, Commodore was a late casualty of the console crash of 84 and the home computer price wars of that year.
Sure Commodore was able to take down Atari's 8 bits, TI and practically every other home computer, but it left them weakened. They couldn't market or support the Amiga as well as they needed to.
And at the same time they were under siege from DOS machines on the high end, and Nintendo and Sega on the low end.
The Amiga could never beat the "you'll never be fired for buying IBM" mindset, which leaked into the minds of home computer users as well. You had home users thinking "The Amiga isn't compatible with anything at the office and that means I can't bring any work home." There were also computer pundits in magazines and books saying. "Yeah the Amiga is nice, but it's not compatible with anything industry standard. It may be nice for video editing and maybe games, but Commodore support is horrible. If all you want to do is games, you're better off with a Nintendo or Sega anyway. For games AND productivity, you want a DOS/Windows machine"
And speaking of Nintendo and Sega...yeah the early Amiga's were better than the NES and Sega Master System.....but not so much with the SNES and Genesis. Remember the best selling Amiga was the 500 model of 1987! Sure it's got 4096 HAM for static images, but it can't match the color and sound of the SNES. And even if you have that Amiga, what games are you going to play? Cheap platformers/arcade style games from Europe where they hadn't figured out the Amiga was a dead end because the import duties made Nintendo and Sega hardware more expensive than it really was? Because of the piracy associated with Commodore platforms, the ports dried up. Cost was an issue too. Unlike the C64 the Amigas had built in disk drives which meant they could never get the price down enough.
this post is an ad for a book
All through that interview I just wanted that Trevor Dickinson guy to stfu. He didn't seem to add anything of any value to the conversation, and ended up just interrupting David Pleasance. Really irritating man.
Windows 95 wasn't any worse from a customer point of view than the Amiga. Both crashed regularly for the same reason -- lack of memory protection. The Amiga was the only pre-emptive multitasking consumer OS before Windows 95 (I don't consider OS/2 to be a consumer OS, its hardware requirements were far higher than a consumer OS, it was a business workstation OS). Once Windows 95 brought that to the Windows world, there was literally no reason for the Amiga to exist anymore -- everything it could do, Windows 95 could do, maybe not as elegantly but for a much lower price.
Thus why the Amiga technology basically died with Commodore -- oh sure, various companies bought the intellectual property over the years, but none of them invested any money in it to bring out new computers. There just wasn't any business logic to doing so in a world that contained Windows 95.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
No it didn't. You could replace ROM libraries with disk-based libraries without a problem at system boot. The only libraries that had to be in the ROM were the disk libraries (else you couldn't load libraries off of disk, duh) and even there, you could replace them after boot. There was a standard API call to get a library handle, that API call didn't care where the library lived, whether disk or ROM, it looked on disk first, and only then did it look for the library in ROM. In fact, workbench.library lived on disk in the very last Amiga 4000 variant because there wasn't enough room in the ROM for it. That said, in the days before systems with 96 gigabytes of RAM, replacing a ROM to upgrade your version of AmigaOS made more sense than using precious RAM to hold copies of libraries. Remember, large numbers of Amigas only had 1 megabyte of memory (I had to scrimp and save to buy a 4 megabyte board for my Amiga 2000) and most never even had hard drives.... I did add an 80 megabyte (!) SCSI hard drive to my Amiga 2000, but the drive plus controller cost almost as much as the computer at the time.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Problem with the PC expandability as a strength, argument is it's limits. It's why people are currently buying a new CPU, MB, and memory to keep up with the latest from AMD and Intel. Kind of like what people would have had to do with the Amiga anyway to keep up with the progression of technology. The main difference between PC and console is the when one has to upgrade, with the stability of the platform going to console, instead of the hodge-podge that has been the PC since it's inception.
You're much fatter than many people who consider themselves obese
My max weight was 400 pounds (30+ years ago), my current weight is 360, and I buy my clothes at the mall. We're not even in the same league. Don't let an inconvenient fact get in the way of your stupidity.
Hot.. 3
The computer that "got me into it" and changed my life :-) i even created and programmed my own video game on it in 1990...
What I remember of the Commodore was flimsy construction and the need to tack on $1000 worth of after market accessories to make it half as useful as a $499 off the shelf business computer. You could program in BASIC, but not save a program, with the base model. Did you ever try to actually save a computer program to a tape recorder with a 300 baud interface? (Bwahahaha,
Satanic wasn't it?) And play a few 8 bit slow as molasses games on expensive cartridges. But, you needed a few hundred to get a 5-1/4 floppy drive to play the good games. If you wanted to use a computer monitor instead of your television so you had better resolution; you had to by an interface module that cost more than the computer (i.e., a graphics card attached by a ribbon cable to the computer)
Naaa, the C64 was a toy company ripping off parents by making them think they were giving their kids a real computer.
NRRPT/RCT
No way could you get a more capable computer for $499.
I'm not sure what you mean by "off-the-shelf business computer" but even PC clones back in the C=64 era cost a couple thousand for anything with decent memory and a hard drive.