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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.
She was his amiga.
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.)
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."
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
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."
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.
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.
" 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.
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.
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)
From the 1800's what?
The Amiga 1800 was the predecessor to the Amiga 2000
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)
"She".
Have gnu, will travel.