3 ms·

So many messages against piracy...and there are some people online saying piracy didn't kill the Amiga...

• vidarh 7y ago
  I really don't think it did. While it may have deterred some software houses, it also spurred hardware sales and without the hardware sales there'd not have been any software market. As an Amiga user at the time, I had plenty of pirated software, but I still spent most of my money on it as well. The amount of piracy was pretty much the same across all the platforms, including the PC, which certainly survived... What killed the Amiga was the severe Commodore mismanagement that meant e.g. the intended followup to the ECS chipset never arrived - the chipset we did get (AGA), too late to save Commodore, was started as a stopgap measure because the intended next generation was years behind schedule in a company that in the 70's had several times designed and built computers from scratch in 3-6 months. Commodore didn't figure out how to do product management and engineering management in the face of systems with vastly increased complexity where having a handful of engineers work on a single next gen iteration just didn't cut it any more. In the meantime Commodore were also pursuing any number of dead-end projects that never saw the light of day (e.g. the "C65" Commodore 64 followup for example), and had totally failed to actually rebuild a dealer network (necessary because Tramiel figuratively burned the US dealer network to the ground right before leaving) and actually market the Amiga in the US, relying largely on European sales to carry the company when the 8-bit models sales were falling off a cliff. Any number of things could have saved it at the time it collapsed, though seeing how Apple also struggled and nearly collapsed, it's not at all clear what chances it'd have had for the long term.