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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.
I cannot say I was "inside". I was pretty darned close, though, as the chief moderator of the Amiga conferences on the late lamented BIX, "BYTE Information Exchange". If I tried to write down everything I heard as Commododo went extinct I'd probably be sued for slander within seconds. I am pretty sure most of what I think I know is accurate. It's generally multiply sourced from the engineers and software people who were there to the end.
When the owner of a company decides to milk it for what he can get out of it as it disintegrates the results are ugly. The motivations varied from ugly to pathetic.
It will be REALLY interesting to see what David has to say about it.
{^_^} formerly long ago jdow@bix[MUNG].com. (Munged to protect the current holders of bix.com.)
The C64? Reliable? Maybe some of the last ones, but according many of the other engineers who worked there when the C64 was in production, including C128 hardware designer Bill Herd, it really was about getting as much hardware out the door quality be damned. In his talk at VCFMW 11 "Bil Herd: Tales from Inside Commodore" (an interesting talk you can find on youtube) he mentions a time when Commodore literally started shipping their own quality control rejects to stores for the Christmas season. The apparent idea behind this was that they were going to mostly be Christmas presents so people wouldn't even notice they were faulty until after Christmas by which time they'd come back to the store to replace them for working machines they'd have been able to produce by then.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
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.
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.
" 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.
Minor quibble - it wasn't until Windows 95 that the Windows PC was getting close. I had first a 500, then a 2000 and a 2500, then a 3000, which was my personal favorite, and my last Amiga was the 4000 with the Toaster.
They were amazing machines, far ahead of the competition for video and 3D work. Finally in either 1999 or 2000, I went to a Mac based nonlinear system, and since Newtek intelligently made their Lightwave 3D software multi-platform, I moved over pretty easily.
Working in video through the 1990's was definitely an experience, from the days of crash editing, to frame buffers, switchers and programmable edits, and it was really "exciting" to do a 3D transition to tape, with software that would load a animation frame into the buffer, then back the VTR to a calibrated point, then put it in record mode, and record exactly one frame, pause, and repeat the process. And heaven help you if you didn't calibrate it before each and every recording session. As well, on a really long animation, after the first day, the calibration was as likely to go bad as not. And just imagine the wear on the tape! One time the director asked why getting an animation to tape took so long, so I had him sit with me for a tiny part of a recording session. And it was damn sad to see how my gorgeous 3-D work was mushed up after going to videotape.
I miss my Amigas, but I don't miss a lot of the workflow in those days.
One can't help but wonder where we would be if Commodore was a well run company instead of being based on the KeyStone Cops management model.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
Damn, I hate rehashing this again in 2017 (I should just let it go!) but I'm a fuckwit so here we go...
As soon as the problem you're talking about started happening (and really, the limits started being felt right around the same time Commodore went out of biz in 1994), everyone and their dog worked around it. By 1997 my A3000 had not only a replaced CPU board (68060) but I was on its first graphics card (CV64, to be replaced with a Picasso 4 a few years later) and sound card too. My whole bus was full of basically-modern (for the time) I/O and I was blowing off the custom hardware as much as I could.
And it was awesome. (Though hacky.) It was so nice to come home from dark ages 486s and Pentiums running Windows at work, to a pleasantly-fast and capable computer.
The custom hardware didn't matter. It was the OS that was so damn fast and kept the machine more usable than the fastest x86 boxes that money could buy, until somewhere around the turn of the century.
The OS was the downfall too (no memory protection, and proprietary so it didn't get as much maintenance as we're all used to today) but it was, nevertheless, the attraction at the time. A "generic whitebox" Amiga would have been welcomed. I think some company even made one but I don't remember much about it, just that it was expensive and I already had my souped-up A3000 anyway, so I didn't bother.
My point, though, is that Commodore could have done that too. The Amiga hardware wasn't as dead-end as you make it out to be, because the 1990s users didn't care about the custom chips. (Granted, in the 1980s people did, but partly because it was so awesome compared to generic stuff.) Had Commodore stayed in the game, the custom ASICs wouldn't have been a problem; they would have simply been replaced. Overall, the platform could have kept up.