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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

What really angered them was when Tramiel dropped the retail price without informing computer stores first, and without offering to refund the difference between the old a and new retail price.

But, yeah, Commodore burned their retail network in the US time and time and time again.

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Among other things the incompetent Commodore management did. Here was a company that did "vertical integration" Apple-style before Apple. They had their own CPU, their own video chips, their own sound chips, custom. They had a platform years ahead of their peers (just compare a 1985 Amiga to a 1985 Mac). But CBM was epically mismanaged, terrible at marketing, but great at paying their CEO big salaries and bonuses.

It is my understanding that a one time Commodore executives were the highest paid people in the microcomputer industry. Millions that could have gone in research, marketing, and just support programs vanished into the pockets of higher management even as Commodore was losing it's market share.

R&D at Commodore was always notoriously underfunded compared to the competition and compared to their size. Which makes what they achieved at their height all the more incredible.

The Commodore 16 and Plus 4 flopped as did the Commodore 9000 machine. Commodore had a PC Clone called the PC-Colt but it didn't sell well. Commodore did little to no marketing in the USA. Everything was sold in toy stores.

The original Amiga hardware (which was later sold as the 1000/500/2000) was developed by a startup which was later bought by Commodore. After the Amiga was a success, they failed to develop the platform further. Ok, it was arguably hard to introduce changes to the existing custom chips while keeping at least a degree of compatibility with old games that relied on all sorts of timing etc. details of the old hardware, but still... When the first Amigas with really improved capabilities (4000/1200) appeared in 1992, it was too little too late.

>their own video chips, their own sound chips, custom

Commodore made sure to fire designers promptly after every new product launch. C-64 custom chip designers founded Ensoniq in 1982, the year C-64 launched. Amiga team was "let go" before Amiga 1000 to 500 cost optimization redesign. This meant Amiga never got HD floppy controller - there was no one capable of upgrading PLL inside Paula.

Oh, we got some warnings alright! On a friday we get a call saying we had to drop the price of item X by $50-$100 on Monday.

Then we had to deal with customers who had just bought the same item in the last week or so.

What would you have considered the normal/preferred way of handling this? After all, hardware price drops were normal, that's how the market was expanded; wouldn't it be the case that no matter when the price came down, someone would've bought it the previous day?

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