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The Real Inside Story of How Commodore Failed (youtube.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the what's-inside dept.

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.

32 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Buttholes by sexconker · · Score: 3, Funny

    Did you perhaps mean to type "Hero to Zero"?

  2. tl;dr by Katatsumuri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    usual corporate insanity, with a touch of bad luck

    1. Re:tl;dr by Wizardess · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.)

    2. Re:tl;dr by The+Cynical+Critic · · Score: 5, Informative

      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."
    3. Re:tl;dr by phantomflanflinger · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

      --
      shin phantomflanflinger
    4. Re:tl;dr by goose-incarnated · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
    5. Re:tl;dr by martyros · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --

      TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.

    6. Re:tl;dr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:tl;dr by Rutulian · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    8. Re: tl;dr by liefer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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)

    9. Re: tl;dr by goose-incarnated · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
    10. Re: tl;dr by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    11. Re:tl;dr by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 3

      Just at a much slower rate when it's dribbling out on a video.

      I am serious. It's really fucking disgusting these days when you're searching online about how to do some specific thing on the computer, and the only thing you can find are narrated 'captures' of some rambling idiot clicking GUI buttons on a video on Youtube. For operations that could be summarized in several paragraphs.

      It's called illiteracy. Literacy is a two-way thing. If you can't write coherently, you are BARELY LITERATE AT ALL.

    12. Re:tl;dr by richy+freeway · · Score: 3, Funny

      You wipe your ass with the face of a turd?

      wtf is wrong with you?

    13. Re: tl;dr by sconeu · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.
    14. Re:tl;dr by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 3

      I think it has more to do with bad timing than luck though. I have an Amiga 4000 still (I used to use it back in the day to edit tape using Amilink and the VT-4000) it still works :) (at 25 years I've reworked the motherboard to replace various components etc), but even I thought (as a die hard) that the A4000 was a bit late to the scene - it was the first Amiga released to the public in 92 to support 8 bit color - most of the high color modes are almost useless hacks (they look very pretty, but outside of animation you can't do much else real time with them). Still the A4000 was the best tool for the job for at least another 2-5 years - with a lot of addons (like the Flyer).

      From what I understand the AA chipset was slated to be released on the Amiga 3000+ as early as 89/90 - if they could have delivered 8 bit color then, and with the Amiga 4000 delivered the AAA chipset in 92 it would have been a major game changer for people who were into graphics workstations.

      And bad management forcing stupid priorities (like CDTV, the Amiga 600 - on and on an on) on their research and development teams and engineering teams it really screwed up their timing and they were constantly releasing products that would have been revolutionary if they came along a year or two earlier.

  3. Re:"A lady mistress" by ContextSwitch · · Score: 5, Funny

    She was his amiga.

  4. More like Nokia/Elop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Still got my old C64 from the early 80s by The+Cynical+Critic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."
  6. Another take on the fall of Commodore by teg · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Skipped over : the impact of standard computing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Skipped over : the impact of standard computing by tendrousbeastie · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I tend to agree with this in general. The computer market certainly did split in the 90s into the console market and the serious computer market. It wasn't really until near 2000 that PCs became gaming machines in the way they are now.

      The Amiga sort of tried to be both at the same time - in Britain, where I am familiar with the Amiga, it utterly failed as a serious computer, and only really existed as games machine. It struggled against the Sega Megadrive/Genesis (Sonic was killing it in every way) and would have utterly failed had it had to compete against the PS1.

      The fundamental trouble for the Amiga, in my opinion (I used one as my primary computer up to 2001, I did most of my first year university coursework on it), was the lack of modularity. Even in the early 90s you could swap out hardware in PCs to take advantage of new releases (e.g. the release of Soundblaster did not require you to by a whole new computer), and manufacturers/retailers could mix and match hardware to meet different needs.

      But with the Amiga you were stuck with maybe 5 or 6 different computers (in the 90s - 600, 1200, 3000, 4000, CDTV, CD32) with a fixed and unchanging hardware. Had they been more modular, and had it therefore been possible to swap out the bitplane graphics system for a pixel based graphics by simply swapping out one card for another then things might have been different.

      I know you could install a Piccaso card and other such graphics cards, but due to built in nature of the AGA and related hardware no mass consumer software would dare support anything else, and there was no real hardware abstraction layer to overcome this. Since none of it was abstracted through anything like OpenGL or DX or anything even remotely similar, no one would write software for any plugin card, preferring instead to target the bigger market for the built in hardware*.

      * After Commodore's death there were some games that started to target plugin gfx cards (Doom and Quake clones, etc. such a Alien Breed 3d) but by then it was clearly too late, and the problem of a lack of a standardised abstraction for hardware was still present anyway.

      So the Amiga was stuck with what was, by the early 90s, crappy bitplane based graphics and crappy 8 bit, 4-channel sound, and no way to move away from this. Without any standardised abstraction system to allow modular hardware (and without virtual, or at least protected, memory) it was just stuck with inadequate hardware.

      Everyone says how Commodore failed because they didn't develop the hardware enough, and didn't release AAA or Hombré hardware like they should have, but it wouldn't have made a difference - they would have released some fantastic hardware which would have been top of the line for a year or two but which would have quickly been overtaken by the competitive market for modular hardware which PCs could take advantage of.

      (First thing I did when I finally ditched my A1200 and got a PC was to go and buy a better graphics board so I could play Giants: Citizen Kabuto)

  8. Are you joking? by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    " 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.

    1. Re:Are you joking? by Shinobi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Are you joking? by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 4, Interesting

      " 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.
  9. Re:Having used a Commodore their was more issues by SlashDread · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.

  10. Ex-Amiga developer here by fyngyrz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here to Zero

    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:

    If Commodore owned the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, they would market it as "Lukewarm dead bird."

    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.
  11. Re: "A lady mistress" by Custard+Horse · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sounds like some term from the 1800's.?

    From the 1800's what?

    The Amiga 1800 was the predecessor to the Amiga 2000

  12. The Deathbed Vigil by nctritech · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  13. Re:"A lady mistress" by PPH · · Score: 5, Funny

    "She".

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  14. 3 main reasons [Re:The real reason CBM failed by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  15. Re:When giants fall by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Amiga was built around a cluster of specially designed ASIC components (named after 'girls' in the documentation). So as technology evolved so that processor speeds could ramp up, the 680x0 chip in the Amiga could be be sped up, but the associated ASIC parts were bound at a restricted speed.

    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.