C64 question

From: Ethan Dicks <ethan_dicks_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Thu Feb 8 10:33:24 2001

Cameron Kaiser wrote:
> You mean if it wasn't for poor engineering and stupid marketing decisions.

It was once said that of Commodore was selling sushi, they'd call it "cold,
raw, dead fish." But Marketing aside, there _were_ a bunch of stupid
engineering decisions, well documented by R.J. Mikal in his "Commodore
Deathbed Vigil" tape. It didn't matter who was at the helm, many engineering
decisions were driven by stock on hand to deplete remnants of previous products
rather than sell off the assets at a loss and use more modern (and expensive)
components. The two that come to mind were the 2114s in the VIC-20 (they
apparently had metric tons of them left-over from the PETs - Jack Tramiel
said he didn't care how much memory the new computer had, as long as they used
up those chips), and the case for the A4000 (*after* the motherboard was
finished Medhi Ali (the LBF) told the engineers to redesign it to fit the
warehouse of PC cases they had from a former Intel-based product, delaying
the launch *substantially*)

It was either one or two years before they went bankrupt that they broke
the Billion Dollar mark in sales. They ended $500M in the hole. There was
a lot of stupidity going on behind the scenes.

-ethan



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35
a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
Received on Thu Feb 08 2001 - 10:33:24 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:33:44 BST