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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.
Jack Tramiel isn't even mentioned by name a single time so you kind of failed right there. The whole interview is basically all about the time after Tramiel left (which according to his son was over an argument with Irving Gould over Gould using the company as his personal piggy bank) and how incompetent basically every single manager brought on after Tramiel's departure was.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
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.
Microsoft wasn't bad technically, but they got where they were in the mid-90's in large part because of Bill Gates' ruthless business instincts.
The latter part of your statement is correct, but Microsoft was definitely bad technically. Both Windows and Office in the 95/98 days were terrible products, that they succeeded in spite of, not because of. This was especially true around the time they were pushing their networking stuff for SMBs. It was a total joke compared to Novell, but they succeeded.
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.
Call the management for what it was: Pure unadulterated corruption. From an old Ars article:
"Ali’s reign at Commodore can be characterized by three main aspects: costly strategic errors, cutting essential research and development (R&D), and increasing the CEO’s compensation. The latter was no small thing. In 1989, Ali received $1.38 million in salary. In 1990, that figure rose to $2 million (not including bonuses), and Irving Gould scored a 40 percent pay raise to $1.75 million. By comparison, the CEO of IBM, John Akers, received $713,000 in the same year."
The other main reason that WP succeeded prior to Windows was that it had drivers for EVERY PRINTER KNOWN TO MANKIND.
Once Windows showed up with a (somewhat) universal printing model, WP's advantage disappeared.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.