Failure of the Amiga — Not Just Mismanagement
Jeremy Reimer’s A History of the Amiga is fascinating beyond description. The latest installment, Part 5, is a delightful tale of mismanagement disaster, on par with Gary Ross’s No Limit: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony. The last paragraph about “vampires” had me laughing until I cried. I’m aching to read Part 6.
Hindsight is of course 20/20 — but I think I know what went wrong with the Amiga (besides the horrible corporate mishandling detailed by Reimer).
I actually did some Amiga programming at two of my jobs in the late 1980s, and as I recall, the GUI was pretty crappy compared to the Macintosh of the same time period. I’m not even sure it compared favorably with Windows 3.1, which was also much worse than the Mac.
Put that together with the same compatibility issues that hurt the Mac against the PC, and it’s easy to see what happened to prevent the Amiga from being a success. The three-way comparison (see imaginary ad in Reimer’s article) might be better summed up this way:
PC: Software- and hardware-compatible with what 90% of other computer users are using.
Mac: Incompatible with what 90% of other computer users are using — but a really nice, well-rounded GUI; much better than on any other computer.
Amiga: Incompatible with what 90% of other computer users are using, and a bad GUI to boot — but some really sweet graphics chips that can do things as good as what you see in the coin-op arcades.
Not too difficult, looking back, to guess what happened to these three machines. The PC dominated, the Mac carved out a successful minority niche, and the Amiga went nowhere. Cheaper than the PC or Mac? Much. But still over a thousand dollars, and you can’t get a significant percentage of the population to shell out that kind of money (and then $50-a-pop for the games) when they can just go buy $20 worth of quarters and have a blast for hours at the local mall.
Slick, graphics-intensive games didn’t complete their move away from coin-op and to the home computer until that same home computer was adequately satisfying the users’ desires for broad-based compatibility with most other computer users and for a decent, all-around GUI with many quality productivity apps running on it. That combination of capabilities was first fully realized by the Windows ’95 PC. The Mac is now seeing a new surge based on unprecedented levels of compatibility with the Windows world, and an unrivaled suite of free productivity software: iLife.
In retrospect, the Amiga engineers seemed to be mentally still living in the late ’70s when personal computers were a novelty and it was perfectly fine for each brand to have its own set of proprietary hardware and software standards, and the OS just had to be minimally functional — the raw graphics and sound capabilities were what mattered most to the typically hobbyist customer. By the mid-’80s when the Amiga was released, that world no longer existed. To be successful with their particular set of talents, the Amiga engineers should have been designing graphics-and-sound cards for PCs. They could have had invented the whole nVidia market before nVidia.
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