3 ms·

Commodore went bankrupt unrelated to a low margin strategy, they were actually bankrupted by a patent troll during a risky attempt at entering the console marke

Commodore went bankrupt unrelated to a low margin strategy, they were actually bankrupted by a patent troll during a risky attempt at entering the console market. The CEO and other executives mismanaged the company, but the story of Commodore's bankruptcy because a patent on the XOR Cursor (!) is one of the reasons I've had a lifelong hatred of software patents. I tell this tale often, but the Amiga was in every way, a better machine than the Mac, so much better it's not even funny. The Amiga 1000 was half the price of the Mac it competed against went it sold, it had higher resolution, color, more RAM, multitasking operating system, expansion slot, hardware accelerated co-processing for display lists, blitting, and a good sound chip. In fact, the Amiga custom chips were better than every other consume PC graphics display at it's time, and it was that way for several years. The Mac128k was a ridiculously overpriced and gimped machine, and for someone who was a kid or teen, migrating from something like a Commodore 64, totally boring. If you were a young kid learning to do graphics or sound programming, the Amiga was inspiring. I probably would not have gotten into computers the way I did had I not be influenced to learn 6502/68000 assembly programming to write demos on the C64 and Amiga due to the multimedia capabilities of those machines, not to mention the excellent games. BTW, while it is true that most productivity software originated on the Mac, most games originated on the PC, very very few games originated on the Mac and ported to the PC. iD games developed on NeXTs and SGI workstations were the exception, but again, still not a Mac, because until recently, Macs sucked for gaming, and have so since the era of the Amiga. I don't think Android is going to kill Apple, but I think the writing is on the wall for it to become a niche. Most of the advantages Apple had have now been commoditized as the market matured. If you look at how open source Linux has devastated the server-side market as well as the embedded market, there's no reason the same thing isn't going to happen in mobile in the long term. It was a nice run, but I don't think Apple's dominance is going to last forever. And the BMW analogy is apt, because while BMW survives, they are just one brand out of many, and do not control or dominate the market unduly.

derefr 13y ago
> iD games developed on NeXTs and SGI workstations were the exception, but again, still not a Mac, The point there was that Jobs was responsible for NeXT as well.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  True, but I don't think it's really relevant, just a nice anecdote. ID was one company, many many amazing, award winning games were developed on other platforms, yet we don't impart any kind of magical powers of productivity to them. When I was going to college, many labs had NeXTs, SGI workstations, or another Unix variant. It's very likely people who were of the same generation would gravitate towards those development environments when they left. The NeXT's strengths, like Interface Builder and Objective-C didn't really apply to DOOM for example.
  - leoc 13y ago
    I assume that Tim Berners-Lee's original Web client http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb is a better poster-child for the NeXT environment and tools. (Not that any of this matters anyway, since no-one is denying that Apple and Jobs were both capable of impressive and influential work.)
podperson 13y ago
If you think Apple fans can be rabid, check out Amiga fans :-) -- I frequently got flamed by fellow Amiga users for having a realistic view of the Amiga's limitations (such as not having a single usable word-processor -- and do not say ProWrite or Excellence -- neither could handle a 10-page document without choking). Commodore did not turn an operating profit during any year in which they were selling the Amiga. The idea that it was just a patent troll is ridiculous. The Amiga was ridiculously superior to the Mac as a piece of hardware (ignoring the lack of a good graphics mode for doing office work on -- you could pick between flickering display and rectangular graphics). It's OS was absolutely awful (AmigaDOS 1.3 or 1.4 -- don't remember which -- was actually created by Commodore licensing the ARP from hobbyists who'd rewritten most of the OS to suck less.)
- cromwellian 13y ago
  If you want to talk about exactly what triggered the entering in Bankruptcy, it was the injunction caused by the XOR patent preventing the CD32 from shipping. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32) Commodore stupidly went "all in" on the console market, no one knows if it would have been another Pippin, Dreamcast, etc failure. But it is not ridiculous, Commodore had moved manufacturing to the Phillipines and if there was no injunction, it is likely CD32 shipments (demand exceeded supply) would have repaid the short term debt they racked up allowing the company to continue as a going concern. You may argue they would have been doomed eventually, but remember, Apple itself was almost bankrupt at one point. Also, you claim about operating profits is false. One Google search was all it took to debunk, http://articles.philly.com/1989-02-01/business/26154229_1_irving-gould-amiga-sales http://articles.philly.com/1989-02-01/business/26154229_1_ir... in 1989, EPS was $1.2 and the Amiga was selling well. AmigaDOS was awful? Compared to what? The MacOS at the time was extremely primitive and ugly. Amiga had a real shell, it had ARexx, vastly superior to AppleScript, it had the equivalent of FUSE filesystems for tons of stuff, compression, networking (DNet), I regularly multitasked between my terminal/dialup and my programming environment. "Workbench", the drag-and-drop "Finder" equivalent was ugly and shitty, but Amiga users didn't use it for much anyway. Yes, the Amiga was not a good "office" computer, it was a home computer, and in that regard, for the market it was targeting -- grown up 8-bitters, it blew away the Mac hard. I had a MacSE, it sat in a closet and in fact, running a MacOS emulator on my Amiga was a better experience than running the real Mac, and I only ran the Mac when I needed to run something required for college that was not available for the Amiga, and that was rare. Nobody I knew in my age range when the Amiga came out gave a hoot about Word Perfect or Excel. The Amiga had perfectly usable, "Google Docs"-like simple word processors that were perfectly fine for most work. I did a lot of my college work with an awesome text editor and LaTeX on the Amiga. There is nothing the Mac really had over the Amiga in it's day, except for AppleTalk, and some high end DTP software, at huge expense. For the home user, especially the creative person interested in art, music, or coding, the Amiga was far better. Compare MacPaint vs DigiPaint for example. Commodore lost their lead by the time the MacII color and PC SVGA rolled out, because they did not put priority into new custom chipsets until it was too late. AGA/AAA arrived way after it had been surpassed by commodity SVGA cards, and the radical designs Dave Hayne/Jay Miner and others were working on for next-generation 3D graphics chips for the Amiga never got the resources. Ultimately, they failed by mismanagement, but the fact that it took the industry 5-7 years to catch up with Amiga Hardware is a testament to how far ahead, how much of a step-function change, the Amiga was. It was the iPhone of 1985 IMHO, but too much ahead of it's time. (BTW, the flickering issue in hires for people who needed it, was fixed by Flicker Fixers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fixer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fixer)

derefr 13y ago

> iD games developed on NeXTs and SGI workstations were the exception, but again, still not a Mac, The point there was that Jobs was responsible for NeXT as well.

cromwellian 13y ago
True, but I don't think it's really relevant, just a nice anecdote. ID was one company, many many amazing, award winning games were developed on other platforms, yet we don't impart any kind of magical powers of productivity to them. When I was going to college, many labs had NeXTs, SGI workstations, or another Unix variant. It's very likely people who were of the same generation would gravitate towards those development environments when they left. The NeXT's strengths, like Interface Builder and Objective-C didn't really apply to DOOM for example.
- leoc 13y ago
  I assume that Tim Berners-Lee's original Web client http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb is a better poster-child for the NeXT environment and tools. (Not that any of this matters anyway, since no-one is denying that Apple and Jobs were both capable of impressive and influential work.)

podperson 13y ago

If you think Apple fans can be rabid, check out Amiga fans :-) -- I frequently got flamed by fellow Amiga users for having a realistic view of the Amiga's limitations (such as not having a single usable word-processor -- and do not say ProWrite or Excellence -- neither could handle a 10-page document without choking). Commodore did not turn an operating profit during any year in which they were selling the Amiga. The idea that it was just a patent troll is ridiculous. The Amiga was ridiculously superior to the Mac as a piece of hardware (ignoring the lack of a good graphics mode for doing office work on -- you could pick between flickering display and rectangular graphics). It's OS was absolutely awful (AmigaDOS 1.3 or 1.4 -- don't remember which -- was actually created by Commodore licensing the ARP from hobbyists who'd rewritten most of the OS to suck less.)

cromwellian 13y ago
If you want to talk about exactly what triggered the entering in Bankruptcy, it was the injunction caused by the XOR patent preventing the CD32 from shipping. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32) Commodore stupidly went "all in" on the console market, no one knows if it would have been another Pippin, Dreamcast, etc failure. But it is not ridiculous, Commodore had moved manufacturing to the Phillipines and if there was no injunction, it is likely CD32 shipments (demand exceeded supply) would have repaid the short term debt they racked up allowing the company to continue as a going concern. You may argue they would have been doomed eventually, but remember, Apple itself was almost bankrupt at one point. Also, you claim about operating profits is false. One Google search was all it took to debunk, http://articles.philly.com/1989-02-01/business/26154229_1_irving-gould-amiga-sales http://articles.philly.com/1989-02-01/business/26154229_1_ir... in 1989, EPS was $1.2 and the Amiga was selling well. AmigaDOS was awful? Compared to what? The MacOS at the time was extremely primitive and ugly. Amiga had a real shell, it had ARexx, vastly superior to AppleScript, it had the equivalent of FUSE filesystems for tons of stuff, compression, networking (DNet), I regularly multitasked between my terminal/dialup and my programming environment. "Workbench", the drag-and-drop "Finder" equivalent was ugly and shitty, but Amiga users didn't use it for much anyway. Yes, the Amiga was not a good "office" computer, it was a home computer, and in that regard, for the market it was targeting -- grown up 8-bitters, it blew away the Mac hard. I had a MacSE, it sat in a closet and in fact, running a MacOS emulator on my Amiga was a better experience than running the real Mac, and I only ran the Mac when I needed to run something required for college that was not available for the Amiga, and that was rare. Nobody I knew in my age range when the Amiga came out gave a hoot about Word Perfect or Excel. The Amiga had perfectly usable, "Google Docs"-like simple word processors that were perfectly fine for most work. I did a lot of my college work with an awesome text editor and LaTeX on the Amiga. There is nothing the Mac really had over the Amiga in it's day, except for AppleTalk, and some high end DTP software, at huge expense. For the home user, especially the creative person interested in art, music, or coding, the Amiga was far better. Compare MacPaint vs DigiPaint for example. Commodore lost their lead by the time the MacII color and PC SVGA rolled out, because they did not put priority into new custom chipsets until it was too late. AGA/AAA arrived way after it had been surpassed by commodity SVGA cards, and the radical designs Dave Hayne/Jay Miner and others were working on for next-generation 3D graphics chips for the Amiga never got the resources. Ultimately, they failed by mismanagement, but the fact that it took the industry 5-7 years to catch up with Amiga Hardware is a testament to how far ahead, how much of a step-function change, the Amiga was. It was the iPhone of 1985 IMHO, but too much ahead of it's time. (BTW, the flickering issue in hires for people who needed it, was fixed by Flicker Fixers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fixer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fixer)