• The Real Inside Story of How Commodore Failed

    From Bobbie Sellers@21:1/5 to All on Sat Oct 14 21:46:45 2017
    Hi Amigans,
    This was passed to me by a friend from the Team Amiga ml.
    It had been on Slash dot but the friend found it on Dave
    Haynie's Facebook page.
    I am not going to look at it because I personally heard
    too much about it at the time but maybe someone in the Commodore
    64 newsgroup would be interested as well.

    bliss


    The Real Inside Story of How Commodore Failed <https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/10/12/2155230/the-real-inside-story-of-how-commodore-failed>
    (youtube.com)

    <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhTNR6XZJd0&feature=share>238 <https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/10/12/2155230/the-real-inside-story-of-how-commodore-failed#comments>

    Posted by BeauHD <https://twitter.com/BeauHD> on Friday October 13, 2017 @03:00AM from the what's-inside dept.
    dryriver <https://hardware.slashdot.org/~dryriver> writes:
    Everybody who was into computers in the 1980s and 1990s
    remembers Commodore producing amazingly innovative, capable and
    popular multimedia and gaming computers one moment, and
    disappearing off the face of the earth the next, leaving
    only PCs and Macs standing.
    Much has been written about what went wrong
    with Commodore over the years, but always by outsiders looking
    in -- journalists, tech writers, not people who were on the
    inside. In a 34 minute long Youtube interview that surfaced on
    October 9th <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhTNR6XZJd0&feature=share>,
    former Commodore UK Managing Director David John Pleasance and
    Trevor Dickinson of A-EON Technology talk very frankly about how
    Commodore really failed, and just how crazy bad and preventable
    the business and tech decisions that killed Commodore were,
    from firing all Amiga engineers for no discernible reason,
    to hiring 40 IBM engineers who didn't understand multimedia
    computing, to not licensing the then-valuable Commodore Business
    Machines (CBM) brand to PC makers to generate an extra
    revenue stream, to one new manager suddenly deciding to
    manufacture in the Philippines -- a place where the man had a
    lady mistress apparently.
    The interview is a truly eye-opening preview of an
    upcoming book David John Pleasance is writing called
    "Commodore: The Inside Story" <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/469255657/commodore-the-inside-story>.

    The book will, for the first time, chronicle the fall
    of Commodore from the insider perspective of an actual
    Commodore Managing Director.

    <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhTNR6XZJd0&feature=share> <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/469255657/commodore-the-inside-story>

    Selah!

    --
    bliss dash SF 4 ever at dslextreme dot com

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  • From Your Name@21:1/5 to Bobbie Sellers on Sun Oct 15 19:27:37 2017
    On 2017-10-15 04:46:45 +0000, Bobbie Sellers said:
    <snip>

    ... to not licensing the then-valuable Commodore Business Machines
    (CBM) brand to PC makers to generate an extra revenue stream, ...
    <snip>

    Licensing out the hardware never works. All that does is cut your own
    profits while adding extra profits to the other makers - the licence
    fees give you a lot less than you get selling your own hardware.

    Apple found out the hard way that licensing the hardware doesn't
    actually work. That's why Steve Jobs axed all the licenses on his
    return to Apple.

    The reason it works with PCs is because the makers build the hardware
    and Microsloth licenses out the *software*, therefore they aren't
    cutting into each other's profits.



    The book will, for the first time, chronicle the fall of Commodore from
    the insider perspective of an actual Commodore Managing Director.

    Hardly an unbiased opinion since it *was* incompetent management that
    killed the company.

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