A history of the Amiga, part 10: The downfall of Commodore

A different approach

In retrospect, taking on Sega and Nintendo was probably not the best approach for a company that was struggling to sell in the much smaller market for personal computers. Commodore’s UK division made headlines by taking out a billboard next to Sega’s headquarters that said, “To get this good will take Sega ages," but this sort of boasting would have been moot just a few years later when Sony introduced the PlayStation and drove Sega out of hardware forever.

The Amiga started as a game console and would have died in the 1983 video game crash if it hadn’t been quickly converted to a personal computer. A decade later, Commodore tried to save its company by turning the Amiga back into a game console, but it was too little and too late.

What if, instead of chasing the volatile video game market, Commodore had simply bundled a CD-ROM drive with the Amiga 1200 instead? In the early '90s, so-called “multimedia” PCs were starting to become a big market, but they were expensive and fiddly and stuck in a chasm between the unfriendly, single-tasking DOS and the rickety paint job of Windows 3.1.

An Amiga 1200 with a built-in CD-ROM drive would have been a perfect entry into this market. With a slight bump in CPU speeds and a better Akiko chip, it could have easily played DOOM, Myst, Wing Commander, and all the other great games of the day. It would have been cheaper, more powerful, and easier to use than multimedia PCs that struggled to display video that was larger than a postage stamp. It could have been sold to students as an entry-level computer, with more powerful units available as their needs increased. Those machines, powered by 68040 and 68060 chips and the AAA chipset, would have easily kept up with high-end PCs.

It's worth noting that Commodore engineers were, at the time of the company's demise, working on even more advanced Amiga architectures. The Hombre project planned to use an HP PA RISC processor and a 3D graphics accelerator card to deliver a truly next-generation Amiga. It, too, was starved of development resources and never released.

Another machine that Commodore should have made but never did was an Amiga laptop. It would have been difficult to re-engineer the Amiga’s powerful custom chips so that they wouldn’t suck up battery life, but not impossible. Commodore simply didn’t have the resources available for such a product and foolishly thought that the market for laptops was not large enough to be worth pursuing.

The blame lies at the top

Commodore had many failings as a company. Steve Jobs had once offered to sell the early Apple to Commodore, but when the company rejected him, he dismissed their management as being “sleazy." Jobs was prone to hyperbole, but he wasn’t entirely inaccurate. Jack Tramiel’s hard-nosed management style often offended both suppliers and resellers, but he at least had a vision for what the company was supposed to be. When he was removed, the new management kept his offensive style but lost any and all strategic outlook.

At the end of the day, Irving Gould was the one who kicked out Tramiel. This created not just a power vacuum but an instant rival. Jack swore revenge, took over Atari, and released the ST, which very nearly killed the Amiga before it had a chance to take off.

Gould also hired and promoted Mehdi Ali, who bled Commodore dry while lining his own pockets. Mehdi Ali would end up hiring people like Bill Sydnes, who had been the product manager for IBM’s PC Junior (the biggest failure in that company’s history) and was responsible for canceling the innovative Amiga A3000+. In the end of Dave Haynie’s Deathbed Vigil video, the Commodore engineers spent their last night painting the names of these managers on the speed bumps in the company parking lot, then burnt a doll of Mehdi Ali in effigy. It was a fate far kinder than these people deserved.

After Commodore liquidated, Ali formed an extremely sketchy management consulting company that vanished from the Web a few years ago. Consulting the Internet Archive shows that Mehdi described himself as having “accomplished a major operational turnaround” during his time serving as president of Commodore. That could be considered true, in a sense. He joined Commodore when it was a billion dollar company and turned it around until it was a bankrupt one.

What we can learn from Commodore’s demise

One of the best things that Mark Twain never actually said was: “History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme.” The stories of Commodore and Apple had many similarities. Both had mercurial, stubborn founders. Both had early successes with 8-bit computers (the Commodore 64 and Apple ][) thanks to underrated technical geniuses (Chuck Peddle and Steve Wozniak), and both later sold 16 and 32-bit computers with fancy GUIs (the Amiga and the Macintosh). Both kicked out their founders, who went on to produce rival products that failed in the marketplace (Atari ST and NeXT).

But Commodore faltered and disappeared, whereas Apple got Jobs to return, and he led the company to become the most valuable on the planet.

Maybe Jack Tramiel was no Steve Jobs. He was older and more single-minded. He never really saw past his idea of selling computers “to the masses, not the classes." The Atari ST was a decent enough computer, but it ended up being a footnote in history, a cheap and poor imitation of the Amiga. The NeXT, on the other hand, contained forward-looking technology that ended up powering both OS X and iOS.

Apple also didn’t have to contend with executives who seemed hell-bent on wringing every last dollar of profit from the company and putting it in their own pockets. If you look at the financial history of Commodore, they always seemed to hover around zero profits: sometimes a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower. A more recent company that also uses that strategy is Amazon, but Jeff Bezos funnels all the money that would end up as profit into growing the company, instead of engineering financial scams that benefit only the top execs.

In the end, Commodore imploded, and it was a sad thing. But the Amiga itself, although it would never challenge for market share again, would survive the death of its parent company. It was a dream given form: a personal computer that was fast and friendly and responsive, that multitasked well, that played great games, and that behaved in a way that made its owners not just fans but fanatics. Today, it is neither gone nor forgotten.