Technically I guess "too little too late" is a way to describe it, but the MSX was a pretty big success in its home country - and at least as big a success worl

Technically I guess "too little too late" is a way to describe it, but the MSX was a pretty big success in its home country - and at least as big a success worldwide as the Amiga was - so you might alternatively describe it as "just enough at just the right time". For your average Japanese consumer, a commodity MSX machine was dirt-cheap and had an absolute murderer's row of high-quality games available for it. The Amiga and Mac were comparatively expensive and software starved for most of the MSX architecture's life...and then the PC came along and ate everything anyway.