I think this is kind of a silly theory as the Amiga was not pushed at the same markets the PC was to any serious degree, and frankly, was not all that suited to.
The Job of a PC was to display some word processor or data crunching spreadsheet prog in a clear and legible font on a screen that didn't cause eye strain. This was it's party piece, and the first Amiga to do that out of the box took five years to arrive.
For the first two years you couldn't even install a hard drive or second floppy drive into the Amiga's case - why? because someone put half the ram where it should go. Maybe it's a blessing that in the first two years the Amiga was not even a mass market computer at all.
@kyle_b, OK, if we're going to go linear, we can. At launch, the 1000 had all the elements but lacking design. Today I look at my A1000 case and I do think it is a beautiful computer externally. However, I am not fond of the function as you note and did all I could to squeeze a more livable Amiga 1200 motherboard inside the case while maintaining originality. We certainly desire some improvements on this 1st version of the Amiga.
However, we must remember that when the Amiga 1000 dropped, a hard drive was an incredibly expensive luxury. Even 5 years later, in 1990 a 20MB around half the price of the A1000 at launch. Every computer was floppy based in 1985, and this one could do quite a bit in that configuration. Not only could it multitask but it could do colour out of the box and the floppy was a massive 880kb capacity - huge at the time in 1985. When I later got the A590 with the 20MB drive, I backed it up onto 2 10-pack boxes of floppies - WOW! Talk about floppy capacity value considering how much 2 boxes of DD Floppies cost vs. a 20MB HDD. When it launched, the A1000 was a very capable machine.
Software makes the platform as we well know, and lack of the key productivity tools forced business to bypass the Amiga as a choice, even if the pricing was very good. Microsoft not developing for Workbench was a key reason that would force people to the PC. To be fair, Microsoft obviously targeted IBM and OS/2 much more, but by no means was the strategy different for Amiga, and Amiga was a much weaker target than IBM.
But let us get out of the 80s. 90s is key. We have a weak 486DX CPU which is aged and outdone by the 68040, and Amiga/Commodore are locked out of using it for a year? Apple launches it exclusively in the Quadras in 1991 and Amiga can't touch the CPU until end of 1992. This is HUGELY consequential. And hugely beneficial for Apple. Apple forges the basis of an exclusive relationship with Motorola here for CPUs, which alows them to expand that exclusivity even further with PowerPC.
So, yes, Bill Gates is one of the ones to blame, because of his decision to strangle the platform with lack of software. And yes Steve Jobs is one of the ones to blame because of starving the platform of a key CPU evolution at a key time. And yes the C= management was incompetent. However, over time I have learned that incompetence is often an excuse for a by-design effort. By now we have seen enough extremely bad executive behaviour, from very racist behaviour at Amazon and Starback to criminal behavour at eBay and others, all resulting in court judgments against these companies. And I'm starting to wonder if there was maybe sabotage from within at Commodore. It seems that the employees felt it was so.
Anyhow, Bill Gates is one of the faces I see in my mind when I think of fall of this beautiful Amiga flatform, and yesterday was the day he fell off his mountain and damaged his legacy with extremely distasteful choices. RIP: Bill Gates Reputation.
Amiga - a female friend in Spanish...karma is really something, ain't it Bill?
en.wikipedia.org
