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.

Comments

tl;dr

[Katatsumuri]

usual corporate insanity, with a touch of bad luck

Re:tl;dr

[goose-incarnated]

Is it just me or has people having the attention of a gold fish become worryingly common these days?

It's the other way around: people with superior attention spans ignore the video in favour of reading.

Stupid people like to watch video. Smart people prefer to read. That 30m video has about 4m worth of content.

Re:tl;dr

[martyros]

It is a boring video though, not a good advert for the book. After 10 minutes I tried to hold down RUN STOP and hit RESTORE.

It is a bit unstructured (as one would expect from an informal chat after beers); but I think it's only boring if you're more interested in technical stuff than in business stuff. But basically, the short answer to why Commodore / Amiga failed (according to him) was poor, and sometimes deliberately malicious, business decisions. That's actually true for most businesses -- 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.

If there's a lesson to be learned for geeks, it's that the business / strategic side of things matters at least as much as the technical side; and that if you want your project / company / technology to succeed, you need people that are good at both.

Re:tl;dr

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me a transcript. I can read it in public transport, or during a break at work, without creating noise. I can read it at my own speed. I can easily reread something I didn't understand, or look it up, and resume from the same point without need to rewind. I can save it to an ebook reader. I can check what given word means if I don't understand it (not native speaker, so it's a big problem with speech).

It's essentially sequential vs random access memory. Videos are simply inconvenient, and unless they have something of value visually, I'm definitely not interested in watching a talking head for 30 minutes.

Re: tl;dr

[liefer]

What a silly and arrogant thing to say. There are benefits to both, of course, which is why universities use both (lectures and reading material)

Re: tl;dr

[goose-incarnated]

What a silly and arrogant thing to say. There are benefits to both, of course, which is why universities use both (lectures and reading material)

There is no benefit to listening to a talking head. Lectures are active (two-way), a talking head on youtube is passive (one-way).

The benefits of video exist only when the video is displaying information that cannot be easily understood with text-only: how to disassemble an iphone, for example. The linked video has, literally, a few minutes of information stretched out over 30m.

There is literally (once again), no reason to make this thing a video other than for people too stupid to read.

Re: tl;dr

[Bing Tsher E]

WordPerfect prior to Windows only succeeded because it's arcane user interface resulted in a culture of guru-experts. Every office had that woman who was a 'wiz' at WordPerfect because she knew all the secret key sequences. Said woman evangelized WordPerfect and kept her flock of users happy using it. The company that produced WordPerfect had exceptionally good customer support to teach and foster the development of their cadre-users out in the world.

More like Nokia/Elop

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Are you joking?

[Viol8]

" 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.

Re:Are you joking?

[Shinobi]

AmigaOS did not support virtual memory by default until 4.0, though there were some 3rd party solutions that kinda-sorta added virtual memory functionality to Exec.

But even then, it wasn't until WinNT and 95 that Windows had anything comparative to what AmigaOS had in 1985 in terms of useful multitasking.

Re:Having used a Commodore their was more issues

[SlashDread]

"Really the advent of Windows a very good graphical interface"

OMG, how much of history (written by the winner) can you corrupt?

Windows was (and by my not so humble opinion, still is) a horrible GUI.

It was MILES behing the user friendly-ness of Amiga and Mac. KILOMETERS! Thats what you get when you STEAL said interface, and do said stealing badly of fears of copyright infringement on icons, and keyboard shortcuts. The Windows GUI was only surpassed as "worse" in the list of shitty GUI's by OS/2. And at least OS/2 was rather stable.

No. Windows "won" due to shady business practises like fucking over IBM (and the rest of the world hoping for apps that could run on choice of GUI) on Lanmanager/Windows/OS2 shared codebase, and the frustration it inflicted on application competition in Windows userspace land. Even choice of "microkernel" DOS (DR DOS vs MS DOS) was actively sabotaged.

Windows a great GUI. PUHLEASE.