[rbanffy]

The Amiga’s heavy focus on TV-friendly timings went deep into the specialised chips to a point it was difficult to upgrade without losing compatibility. Because of that lack of modularity Commodore had to spend more resources to develop improved machines than its competitors. It was not an obvious mistake then, and it’s not clear now what they could have done to better compete with PCs and Macs.

They could have made much simpler “productivity Amigas” with plain VGA-like graphics to leverage its non gaming software market, at the expense of only having minimal graphics and sound support. There was, IIRC, one, made by a third party that lacked the Amiga chipset, but running the Amiga OS. If they could push something as cheap to make as a Mac LC, they’d have a much more attractive offering for businesses.

[amiga386]

I think you're missing the elephant in the room. The IBM PC existed. That was it, that's all that mattered. Nobody got fired for buying IBM. Every computer for "business" collapsed because the IBM PC was here.

Macs only survived to the 1990s by hiding from the PC in a desktop publishing niche. Amigas and Ataris survived as games machines with multimedia capabilities. An Amiga that could not run Amiga games would basically be a Sun workstation. Businesses wanted IBM PCs.

Also, the "compatibility" was a two-way street. Amiga games banged the hardware directly and did amazing things on hardware of the time because of it, but that meant hardware-level compatibility for anything which came next otherwise it'd be the Amiga that couldn't run Amiga games. MacOS software was told not to touch hardware directly but go through the OS, and they did that, and thus all MacOS software was slow and ugly, and Apple still jettisoned compatibility anyway once they moved into the 1990s and started changing underlying hardware to PowerPC.

There's always the hypothetical that Commodore could have continued, but what really got them was that the nature of games changed. 3D was in, and they were still pushing 1980s arcade machine tricks. They weren't even thinking in that direction when along game Wolfenstein and DOOM pushing chunky pixels to VGA mode X, and the Playstation was just around the corner. I don't think just having a faster CPU, "VGA" and trying to appeal to business would have cut the mustard.

[abanana]

True, but "Amiga made lots of assumptions about the use that ended up..." seemed an odd way to phrase it, given that it was originally designed as a games machine, although the plans were expanded later in development.

As I understand it, its custom chips were a brilliantly clever solution to a problem that existed at the time. It couldn't be called a mistake, because they couldn't see into the future. As a games machine, the Amiga ended up hamstrung by those same custom chips because they weren't the right architecture for Doom and all the 3D games that followed it. That made no difference to its productivity software though, did it?

[rbanffy]

> That made no difference to its productivity software though, did it?

If you build productivity software you’ll prioritise platforms sold for businesses. If most of the units are sold to be used mostly for gaming, your target market gets very small.