Why did commodore go bankrupt

On April 29, , Commodore International Limited announced that it was starting the initial phase of voluntary liquidation of all of its assets and filing for bankruptcy protection. Commodore, once the savior of the Amiga, had failed to save itself. Why did this happen? Was it inevitable, or could the company have made different choices and kept both itself and the Amiga platform alive and healthy?

There are those who would argue the former. Computing platforms tend to start with many different competitors and then slowly dwindle down to one or two survivors.

Those seven became five and then essentially one after mergers and acquisitions. There were more than personal computer platforms in the early '80s, but by only two remained that sold enough to be measurable: PC compatibles at 91 percent share and Macintoshes at 9 percent. But is the survival of more than two computing platforms an ironclad law of technology or just a coincidence? There are exceptions—game consoles went through two separate generations with three viable competitors: Nintendo, Sega, and Sony in the s, and Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony from the s until present-day.

In addition, a declining market share is not irreversible. The Macintosh, after hitting a low of under two percent in , has since rebounded to a healthy 7. Could a trio of PCs, Macintoshes, and Amigas have coexisted in an alternate universe? I think so. Ultimately, the failure rests with Commodore management, who not only failed to adapt to a changing marketplace, but in many cases were actively hostile to their own company. To understand what they did and why they did it, we have to jump far back in time—to the creation of Commodore itself.

Jack Tramiel founded Commodore in , leveraging his experiences repairing typewriters after the war to build up a small stable of office products, including adding machines. Jack was a Holocaust survivor, and his aggressive, take-no-prisoners approach to business sometimes got him in trouble. In , he was involved in a scandal when the Alliance Acceptance Corporation, a Canadian financial company, suddenly collapsed. Tramiel had close ties to Alliance, and although he was not indicted, the scandal wrecked Commodore.

To survive, Tramiel was forced to sell a large share of his company to Irving Gould, a Canadian financier. Gould now held the purse strings. For a while, this strategy worked well. Then, he believed that Jack was trying to position his sons to take over the company. In any case, Gould managed to get Tramiel to suddenly resign from the company he founded in Gould then proceeded to hand-pick a series of CEOs with little or no experience in the personal computing industry.

Some, like Marshall Smith, were terrible, whereas others, like Thomas Rattigan, managed to bring the company back to profitability. One thing was consistent, however: Commodore CEOs, like hockey coaches, were hired to be fired. They are trying to make a buck on retro-people by designing computer cases that look like the old Commodore ones. There is even an effort similar to this for the Amiga brand, you will be able to buy 'modern' versions of the Commodore Amiga systems, which is nothing more than a generic case with a PC inside, and there is even talk of a Linux OS with a WorkBench theme.

So basically, if you are looking for the old Commodore, you can still buy used stuff on ebay, or simply run an emulator. What you might be interested in is checking www. Also, if you like the SID music of the Commodore, you might want to check out the High Voltage Sid Collection; see links There are still large Commodore and Amiga communities around on the IRC and web forums, you might want to keep an eye out for those if you are interested in reconnecting with the community.

For example vesalia and amigakit has some interesting products, for example a joystick with a built-in C Amiga was created in The Commodore Amiga was a personal computer produced in the mid 80's and early 90's. The game was developed by Time Warp Productions. A video toaster was used for a commodore Amiga-based system offering a huge library of special effects many cheesy, some very tasteful, and all frankly amazing.

Amiga en portugues es igual a: Amiga. Amiga World was created in Amiga Action was created in Amiga Action ended in Amiga Active was created in Amiga Active ended in Amiga E was created in Amiga Format ended in Amiga Format was created in Amiga Force ended in Amiga Power ended in Amiga Power was created in Amiga Forever was created in Amiga World ended in Log in.

Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. Take it as a lesson, success is an ongoing process, and markets change rapidly. Study guides. Computer Networking 20 cards. What are advantages of Database Approach. What is a network that covers a large geographical area such as a city country or world.

What is the worlds largest wan. That's actually true for most businesses -- Microsoft wasn't bad technically, but they got where they were in the mid's in large part because of Bill Gates' ruthless business instincts.

Microsoft wasn't bad technically, but they got where they were in the mid's in large part because of Bill Gates' ruthless business instincts. The latter part of your statement is correct, but Microsoft was definitely bad technically. This was especially true around the time they were pushing their networking stuff for SMBs. It was a total joke compared to Novell, but they succeeded. And their push for IPX was not scaling well for multi-site networks. And don't get me started for the newer Java based monstrosities.

By that time all new typesetters were pretty much used to Office. You kids aren't going far enough back in time. The difference was that Windows was cheaper and they had OEM bundling early on, which led to better support from vendors hardware and software.

From there it just snowballed. This is how Microsoft won. They didn't have a technically superior product, they just anticipated the market better and aggressively pushed their software out to as many people as they could reach while simultaneously locking out their competition wherever possible. Novell, while working great for DOS systems, was unusable for Windows. Don't forget that MS practically catered to pirates of the time read: students and younger computer geeks by having essentially no copy protection.

Wysiwyg as a tool is not very good. It gets in the way of having a properly and consistently formatted document. Generally documents work better if you just get in the plain text first and then add formatting later. Even better if you have automatic formatting rules. WordPerfect prior to Windows only succeeded because it's arcane user interface resulted in a culture of guru-experts. Every office had that woman who was a 'wiz' at WordPerfect because she knew all the secret key sequences.

Said woman evangelized WordPerfect and kept her flock of users happy using it. The company that produced WordPerfect had exceptionally good customer support to teach and foster the development of their cadre-users out in the world. I don't know, I happily used WordPerfect for as long as I could, until Office file compatibility became impossible to avoid.

I think Microsoft just succeeded at marketing. They offered discounts. They offered bundling. They practically gave away the stripped down Microsoft Works. File formats became a big issue because competitors couldn't properly render and save Office documents. The likes of WordPerfect probably could have settled at some non-majority fraction of total market share, but file format compa.

Is it just me or has people having the attention of a gold fish become worryingly common these days? It's the other way around: people with superior attention spans ignore the video in favour of reading. Stupid people like to watch video. Smart people prefer to read. That 30m video has about 4m worth of content. What a silly and arrogant thing to say.

There are benefits to both, of course, which is why universities use both lectures and reading material. There is no benefit to listening to a talking head. Lectures are active two-way , a talking head on youtube is passive one-way. The benefits of video exist only when the video is displaying information that cannot be easily understood with text-only: how to disassemble an iphone, for example.

The linked video has, literally, a few minutes of information stretched out over 30m. There is literally once again , no reason to make this thing a video other than for people too stupid to read.

My personal theory as to why people take simple crap and make a video of it is they hope to monetize it. I be you will find that videos are cheaper and easier to produce and to host that transcripts or even written articles, especially when taking into account total time a person spends on a website. I am serious. It's really fucking disgusting these days when you're searching online about how to do some specific thing on the computer, and the only thing you can find are narrated 'captures' of some rambling idiot clicking GUI buttons on a video on Youtube.

For operations that could be summarized in several paragraphs. It's called illiteracy. Literacy is a two-way thing. Especially when its technical howtos involving a lot of typed input like commands, that you have to either try and decipher the guy's accent or read the text from the video. Give me a transcript. I can read it in public transport, or during a break at work, without creating noise.

I can read it at my own speed. I can easily reread something I didn't understand, or look it up, and resume from the same point without need to rewind. I can save it to an ebook reader. I can check what given word means if I don't understand it not native speaker, so it's a big problem with speech. It's essentially sequential vs random access memory. Videos are simply inconvenient, and unless they have something of value visually, I'm definitely not interested in watching a talking head for 30 minutes.

Then there was a second chance, which was a licensing deal with a Chinese company, and a malicious German manager scuppered that to favor a German buyer who didn't have the resources to compete. That was the end of it. I'm reminded of what Elop did to Nokia, the combination of a malicious CEO more loyal to an outside company, and a weak board unwilling to tackle the CEO.

You hear stories like this all-too-frequently. Start-up decides they need Serious Management, hires a guy from a famous east coast company, then the guy turns out to be interested in using the company as a stock scam-- do the IPO, cash-in, and let it crash.

One angle on the story is that the early microcomputers encouraged hacking by putting Basic right in people's faces, and giving them an environment where you could use it to generate some sort of graphical output.

Weirdly enough, the tools to do text-editing were nearly completely absent Of course now we've moved beyond those primitive days, and instead of Basic everyone learns Javascript. Thanks for the heads-up. I re-read Brian Bagnall's "On the Edge" about once a year which is also a fascinating read. Still got my old C64 from the early 80s and it still works, solid reliable hardware. Those days are long gone. In his talk at VCFMW 11 "Bil Herd: Tales from Inside Commodore" an interesting talk you can find on youtube he mentions a time when Commodore literally started shipping their own quality control rejects to stores for the Christmas season.

C's and standard issue CW keys, a networked hard drive, and amber monitors. Worked wonderfully well, the Army got a hell of a deal it was my first work as an independent programmer, a "proof of me" sort of thing. The little C's held up just fine Yeah, I call this shipping "product placebos". Bought a mop recently-- name brand and I've used their products before-- from a housewares chain: it clearly didn't work and couldn't possibly work the handle was two snap together pieces that wouldn't stay together after even a single use.

To be fair a lot of machines from that era are dying now. Batteries became more and more common in the 80s, and of course they leak. I had to replace a few when restoring an Amiga recently. Capacitors commonly go, even good ones of that age. Storage media are a problem too - tapes are generally fairly reliable but the tape decks die, usually the drive belt. C64 floppy drives were unreliable even back in the day, so actually these days they are probably mo. The caps are really the biggest problem, ROMs are cheap enough and were usually socketed back then to enable upgrades as Amiga ROMs are but that was the era when smt caps became ubiquitous so you realistically need a hot air rework station to replace them.

I need to recap my a eventually. In theory I could just do it with my iron, I did a test on a router with a similar cap and it is doable Power supplies are mostly dead now too, but those are also mostly caps.

I still put a picopsu in my Hakko make some U shaped tips that are ideal for removing SMT components. Some caps are too large but I think the Amiga ones are fine.

Then again, hot air rework stations are so cheap now Not looking forward to when the Cyberstorm PPC will need replacing Ars Technica published a story on the fall of Commodore [arstechnica.

Reading this was a nice trip down memory lane, my first computer was a Commodore 64 and the second one a Commodore Amiga What about AMIX? This could have borne a new line of architecture directly competing with PC in the office and standard computing, while bearing familiarity to home and multimedia computing of classic Amiga line.

And to be completely honest, the PC architecture was horribly clunky at the time. I tend to agree with this in general. The computer market certainly did split in the 90s into the console market and the serious computer market. It wasn't really until near that PCs became gaming machines in the way they are now. The Amiga sort of tried to be both at the same time - in Britain, where I am familiar with the Amiga, it utterly failed as a serious computer, and only really existed as games machine.

The fundamental trouble for the Amiga, in my opinion I used one as my primary computer up to , I did most of my first year university coursework on it , was the lack of modularity. Even in the early 90s you could swap out hardware in PCs to take advantage of new releases e. But with the Amiga you were stuck with maybe 5 or 6 different computers in the 90s - , , , , CDTV, CD32 with a fixed and unchanging hardware.

Had they been more modular, and had it therefore been possible to swap out the bitplane graphics system for a pixel based graphics by simply swapping out one card for another then things might have been different. I know you could install a Piccaso card and other such graphics cards, but due to built in nature of the AGA and related hardware no mass consumer software would dare support anything else, and there was no real hardware abstraction layer to overcome this.

So the Amiga was stuck with what was, by the early 90s, crappy bitplane based graphics and crappy 8 bit, 4-channel sound, and no way to move away from this. Without any standardised abstraction system to allow modular hardware and without virtual, or at least protected, memory it was just stuck with inadequate hardware.

There was an abstraction layer, that's why the OS and well behaved apps can run just fine once you've installed a picasso or similar card.

The problem is that abstraction layers are slow, so games usually wrote directly to the hardware to get better performance. There was an big internal battle about whether to split the lines into business computers and consumer computers.

Tramiel felt more comfortable competing in the consumer realm, but many top engineers and board members felt the business market had better margins. Tramiel wanted to be a low-cost volume producer instead of the deal with complex higher-end systems. He wanted to crank out mass widgets, not be IBM. After all, that's why the C64 was successful.