> Ah well, they won, and Atari / Amiga / Commodore lost; better doesn't mean you win.
This being said, Atari and Commodore had several YEARS of opportunities to launch new machines and "kill" the PC (or at least become something that would last longer than a generation), and did not do anything. The Amiga 1200 and Falcon were both very late to the party and underpowered when PCs started to be cheap enough and way more powerful than these machines.
PC gaming also benefited from the fantastic works of Origin (before they were acquired by EA) with a bunch of exclusives (Wing Commander 1 was a revolution in 1991, and convinced many people the PC could also be a gaming platform).
I was on the Amiga during that period and I could see the tide coming, while Commodore and Atari stood and just watched. What a pity.
No kidding about the lost opportunity. It was frustrating enough from inside Atari (both the Warner and Tramiel companies).
- Warner was all about politics, and marketing had taken over major engineering decisions. It was one big balled-up rollerskating disaster as marketroids failed to grasp things on the level of: Adding a HELP key to a computer keyboard does not mean that you automatically get help in every application, especially not game cartridges with very limited space.
- Tramiel was all about not spending money. Vendors who were in the know (like DEC, who serviced our Vaxes until the Tramiels stopped paying for maintenance) demanded payment up front, with cashiers checks or other guaranteed instruments.
Both of these organizations were really tough to do good, high visibility products in. Lots of good stuff got canned (by people with political agendas to push), or couldn't be developed because of the lack of good people.
Sometimes I daydream about how things worked out in an alternate universe ... :-)
Commodore was severely dysfunctional as long as it existed. I recommend the book Commodore: A Company on the Edge (there are two editions - the new edition was meant to be split into two volumes, but only the first volume covering the "8-bit years" have been published). Given that Tramiel brought a lot of that dysfunction with him to Atari it is not much of a surprise that they ran into problems too.
Lack of proper R&D investment was a recurring theme at Commodore from the beginning, but there were tons of problems. Not least towards the end - well after Tramiel - there was Bill Sydnes: Commodore actually hired the guy behind the PCjr - sometimes described as the worst flop ever. So they hired him, and he did his best to live up to his reputation from the PCjr.
The worst part was that he proceeded to make decisions based on ludicrous ideas that "everyone" in the Amiga market could have told him were idiotic (trying to shift more of Commodore's business to the PC division; release a new flagship Amiga model with IDE in the Amiga market? I still remember the total shock and disbelief everyone I knew had when the A4000 was finally unveiled, too late, at too high a cost). The worst part of course being that in doing so he also cancelled or demanded changes to a number of projects that were much better. E.g. there was the A3000+ which would have been a far better machine than the A4000 with the same CPU models, and was far cheaper, and was almost ready by the time Sydnes cancelled it (there exists a number of prototype models, and they still work), and had SCSI. And added a DSP.
But even with proper management there was the Motorola problem - their inability to boost the performance of the 68040 far enough, fast enough. It's not clear Commodore would have had the resources to pull through a PPC transition the way Apple did.
Arrogance, plain and simple. I'm not entirely sure it's warranted, but it brings Apple to mind. They, too, experienced a massive slump... but at least they recovered.
Funny thing is, it seemed to be that Amiga would be making a comeback in the early 2000s as well, with "new" hardware (PPC, and still relatively underpowered). Alas, things fizzled out. Way too late to market, and way too little buzz.
Actually the PPC Amigas were already available in the late 90s (my memory is not clear on when anymore, but maybe 97-98), but they were anyway too expensive and too underpowered to change anything. However it's been interesting to see that third parties have been pushing the hardware forward, as well as the OS (Eyetech for Hardware, MorphOS for new OS inspired and partly compatible with AmigaOS). There's still a very small and niche community using "modern" Amiga. But it's only a shadow of what it was...
They used Motorola CPUs all along, but they kept doing so in the face of their diminishing (relative) performance, THAT'S what I was trying to point out. :)
AAPL bailed and went with Intel as we all know. I can't help but wonder what would have happened if the Amiga rights holders would have done something similar.
This being said, Atari and Commodore had several YEARS of opportunities to launch new machines and "kill" the PC (or at least become something that would last longer than a generation), and did not do anything. The Amiga 1200 and Falcon were both very late to the party and underpowered when PCs started to be cheap enough and way more powerful than these machines.
PC gaming also benefited from the fantastic works of Origin (before they were acquired by EA) with a bunch of exclusives (Wing Commander 1 was a revolution in 1991, and convinced many people the PC could also be a gaming platform).
I was on the Amiga during that period and I could see the tide coming, while Commodore and Atari stood and just watched. What a pity.