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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

They didn't learn the lessons from the C64 which was a runaway success. No effort to make a product line with forward compatibility. Minimal effort on software. Bizarre pricing strategies.

At least with Tramiel at the helm they had a strategy of going for the long tail of the market by selling at rock bottom prices. Once he was gone they floundered around, and almost got beaten by Tramiel's Atari. It's only once they release the Amiga 500 -- which looked an awful like the 520ST case and strategy wise -- and dropped the price that they caught the lead.

When I bought my ST the 500 wasn't out yet, and the Amiga 1000 was priced way beyond my budget. The 520STfm I bought with monitor was around the same price as the Commodore 128, which I was considering before I discovered the ST.

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Tramiel had a habit of firing good engineers 3 months after product release. Either directly, or by screwing them by moving to useless positions or taking bonuses away until people 'got the message'. Those who didnt get what was going on or didnt care about money/dignity were the ones who stayed as long term employees. Jack had an eye for suckers and people putting passion before common sense and self respect.

Whole C64 design team was effed out of promised bonuses and fired/left. People like Bruce Crockett (manufacturing), Al Charpentier (VIC) and Robert Yannes (SID) went to start Ensoniq (later sold to Creative), Chuck Peddle went to Apple, Bill Mensch hung around for two years of abuse. Same with Amiga team (Jay,RJ,Needle).

Those two videos touch on the Commodore culture of curb stomping until only the weak and dumb survive:

Oral History of Chuck Peddle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enHF9lMseP8

Oral History of William David "Bill" Mensch Jr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne1ApyqSvm0

That's interesting, though your example of the Amiga team -- they weren't there under Tramiel, so would have nothing to do with him in particular. Though I'm sure the culture there was rotten.

Commodore went from being hostile and ruthless (but profitable and successful!) under Tramiel to plain stupid under Rattigan to corrupt under Mehdi.

That's true, a lot of the problems came down to Irving Gould - Tramiels main investor. While Tramiel was there they appear to have countered each others flaws just enough for things to mostly work. After Tramiel, Gould went through executives in short order, and most of them had no idea how to properly leverage what Commodore had.

That said, Tramiels last pricing stunt (drastically dripping the price without preparing the distribution chain, and so hanging them out to dry) also contributed to gutting Commodores distributor network in the US in a way they never really managed to fix.

By and large, Commodore invented the "double-burger" tax-shelter, and discovered to their dismay that it was very hard to funnel the "liberated" money back into the company for investments.

The lack of a vision going forward also caused local projects to suck up too many resources, Germanys PCs, the C16/+4 disaster and so on.

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