4 ms·

I recently read a book about Commodore's downfall and it's clear that its disappearance was due to a lack of future vision and future planning in Jack Tramiel's

I recently read a book about Commodore's downfall and it's clear that its disappearance was due to a lack of future vision and future planning in Jack Tramiel's part. He got lucky with the Commodore 64 and was looking for the next big hit. Rather than to develop the company while keeping its customers happy, he focused on short-term profits. He had no idea what to develop for the company's customers. So he hoped a new hit would save the company. Commodore owned the market for home computers. Commodore's customers would have stayed loyal to the company if they could have gotten a product that moved the Commodore technology forward but they could not advance the technology. They saw sales decline and decided to find another hit rather than to advance the technology. When he moved on to Atari he developed a great machine but he just did not know how to move forward the same way he did not know with Commodore.

laumars 8y ago
It's easy to Tramiel for not having vision but what you're describing simply wasn't a thing in that era. Computers were silos which where hardware incompatible with one another. And the few instances where a next gen machine was build with support for its predecessors, that generally harmed the successor more than helped as fewer developers wrote bespoke software for the newer platform (why would you when you could target all versions of the product line instead of just the lastest machine?). However that didn't stop Atari from having a go with the many revisions of the ST and, later, the Falcon. Plus the ST and C64 were largely sold as games machines (yes, I'm aware of the popularity of using the ST as a MIDI sequencer etc) and consoles of that era didn't follow an upgrade path either (baring the Atari 7800 being largely hardware compatible with the 2600 but the 7800 wasn't exactly a success because of that). Many accounts of history actually look more favourably on Jack Tramiel as they argue that had the American Commedore offices taken his lead (like the European division did) and sold the Amiga in toy stores as well as the usual places - as the Atari ST was sold in Toys R Us across Europe - then the Amiga might not have flopped in the US. And there is good reason to believe Tramiel's strategy worked as the ST was a massive hit and the Amiga had a lot more success in Europe and America after the European division of Commedore started copying Tramiel's business strategy. Ultimately though, few hardware manufacturers from that era survived. Even Apple nearly went under (several times in fact, Microsoft had to bail them out on one occasion just to avoid a desktop monopoly). And IBM didn't exactly do well out of upgradeable machines as the market just got flooded with cheap clones which IBM got no cut from. So it's very easy to blame Tramiel with hindsight but in reality he was one of the few which had multiple successes.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  > Computers were silos which where hardware incompatible with one another. Current OEMs seem to be quite willing to return to those days, as solution to their thin razor margins now with the rise of mobile computing.
  - jbverschoor 8y ago
    The MSX was manufactured by a lot of companies.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      And a market failure outside Japan, as far as I can recall.
      - mepian 8y ago
        It was rather popular in Russia for a while.
        Fins 8y ago
        And Brazil, IIRC.
    - squarefoot 8y ago
      But it was too little too late. I had a pretty expensive MSX capable computer in the late 80s, the Yamaha CX5 I used only for music because nearly all software around ran on different architectures like the C64 which was inferior compared to it. By the time it started to be widely known it would soon succumb to the ST or the Amiga.

laumars 8y ago

It's easy to Tramiel for not having vision but what you're describing simply wasn't a thing in that era. Computers were silos which where hardware incompatible with one another. And the few instances where a next gen machine was build with support for its predecessors, that generally harmed the successor more than helped as fewer developers wrote bespoke software for the newer platform (why would you when you could target all versions of the product line instead of just the lastest machine?). However that didn't stop Atari from having a go with the many revisions of the ST and, later, the Falcon. Plus the ST and C64 were largely sold as games machines (yes, I'm aware of the popularity of using the ST as a MIDI sequencer etc) and consoles of that era didn't follow an upgrade path either (baring the Atari 7800 being largely hardware compatible with the 2600 but the 7800 wasn't exactly a success because of that). Many accounts of history actually look more favourably on Jack Tramiel as they argue that had the American Commedore offices taken his lead (like the European division did) and sold the Amiga in toy stores as well as the usual places - as the Atari ST was sold in Toys R Us across Europe - then the Amiga might not have flopped in the US. And there is good reason to believe Tramiel's strategy worked as the ST was a massive hit and the Amiga had a lot more success in Europe and America after the European division of Commedore started copying Tramiel's business strategy. Ultimately though, few hardware manufacturers from that era survived. Even Apple nearly went under (several times in fact, Microsoft had to bail them out on one occasion just to avoid a desktop monopoly). And IBM didn't exactly do well out of upgradeable machines as the market just got flooded with cheap clones which IBM got no cut from. So it's very easy to blame Tramiel with hindsight but in reality he was one of the few which had multiple successes.

pjmlp 8y ago
> Computers were silos which where hardware incompatible with one another. Current OEMs seem to be quite willing to return to those days, as solution to their thin razor margins now with the rise of mobile computing.
- jbverschoor 8y ago
  The MSX was manufactured by a lot of companies.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    And a market failure outside Japan, as far as I can recall.
    - mepian 8y ago
      It was rather popular in Russia for a while.
      - Fins 8y ago
        And Brazil, IIRC.
  - squarefoot 8y ago
    But it was too little too late. I had a pretty expensive MSX capable computer in the late 80s, the Yamaha CX5 I used only for music because nearly all software around ran on different architectures like the C64 which was inferior compared to it. By the time it started to be widely known it would soon succumb to the ST or the Amiga.