Posted By
MMS
on 2021-01-05
16:12:20
 |  Re: C264 Series Market Failure in Retrospect
AFAIK the main reason of the conflict between Gould and Jack, that the later -after seeing the latest development and news on CES- wanted to develop a 32 bit computer. At that time he was not aware of the Amiga platform (even Commodore was not aware of the team working on that arcade, but expandable platform).
Gould -as told- was just willing to milk the cow (successful 8 bit line), and he found it too risky and costly to develop a 32 bit based platform from zero.
Jack was a visionary person (like Steve Jobs), and always after continuous development.
He understood, that he will not get the money from Gould to develop a new 32bit computer line, so he left.
AAmiga and any other 32 bit platform was not in the plans of C=, it was come into picture after Jack bought Atari. C= management got aware of Amiga project only after Jack left, and started the discussion. They knew, with that quick step (buying Amiga team and the platform) Jack could completely eliminate Commodore from the market, that's why they bough it for a rather high price. Jack made the mistake: he made clear during the discussion he does not need the Amiga team, just the hardware (he had his own engineers left C=), and wanted the project at a very low price. Certainly the Amiga team wanted a different buyer than this, and Commodore promised everything (although within few years C= management changed the project focus, and fired the project members step by step (if they did no leave themselves)).
About the 264 series, my view:
Jack was a visionary person, but not all his visions fulfilled.
He was aware that Microsoft is establishing the MSX series, and he was afraid, that the standarized, cheap Japanese computers will be a huge challange to the Commodore 8 bits. (in fact, a specification miskake made the MSX lines alsmot incompatible with each other, and only with smart (and slow) programming it could be managed (this was that Microsoft did not define the memory bank addresses of the RAM, ROM, etc, so every producer made his own version, almsot killed the compatibility of the MSX machines)
Also, Jack wanted to take over UK, and at the time the 264 project established, the main seller was ZX Spectrum 16K. He did not expect, that 48K version will be that affordable. But situation quickly changed.
The C116 was more competitive in every single point than the 16KB ZX Spectrum. Similar speed with the more efficient 6502 code, two times more sound, much more colors, higher resolutions, built in floppy controller, proper video and sound output. But the weak (and really hard + costy) memory upgrade of the C116/C16 line became a fatal failure when the most of the 16KB ZX Spectrums were quickly upgraded to 48KB by Sinclair themselves. Most of the iconic games on ZX Spectrum were made for 48KB, even the game cartridge of the ZX with Interface 1 was a failure due to 16KB limitation, only the most simple games were fit. You can imagine, how much more complex those iconic C16 games could be with just 32KB RAM.
The built-in SW of +4 could be in real use, if would not be so much limited in some unlogical way (like the maximum 100 lines in a text editor, the free RAM did not explain this) or would better fit to the configuration most of the +4 setups sold (mainly the systems were sold with datasette, but 3+1 could not use it, 1541 was pretty expensive, 1551 was rare and late).
I think the little "Home office" PC concept (after Jack left) could work with the IEEE-488 PET devices could be linked with the +4, with a little less limited built-in SW, and a really working memory upgrade possibility. But saving to datasette could let more ppl use it, at least. All the kernal routines for that are in the machine...
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