| Posted By
Spector
on 2004-11-11
18:00:03
|  Commodore's market decisions in the 80s
Commodore decided to bring out the Plus4 and the C16 in 1984. The bigger seller of the two, the Commodore 16, was intended to compete with the Spectrum price wise in a way the C64 could not. Of course the C16 failed to come close and was dead a couple of years afterwards. The plus4 was intended to be a serious business machine with it's spreadsheet applications etc, and it too failed. Part of the reason was that they entered an overcrowded market and were incompatible with existing Commodore machines.
And this brings me to the question:
In 1983, when Commodore were looking at the Spectrum's dominance of much of Europe, why didn't they just say "Okay - let's make a 16K version of the Commodore 64. It will have all the same specifications, the only difference will be that it has just 16K rather than 64K. We can save money by not developing a different standard, and we will create an added incentive for the customer by selling a RAM expansion pack that would turn the C16 into a 64K machine. Therefore they can buy the Commodore 16 cheap, and later on, if they want to, they can upgrade to a fully fledged Commodore 64".
This would have surely made greater marketing sense. The C64 did have the more expensive SID chip and sprite handling, but the C16 had a far better colour pallette of 121 colours compared to the C64's 16. The price for a 16K version of the C64 would surely not have been much greater than for the original C16. Why didn't they do this? If they had, I may never have got a Spectrum and would have been a Commodore player all my life, which is an interesting thought for me. And remember that the Spectrum came out with a 16K model for a while at £50 cheaper than the full size 48K. Commodore could have done the same. It may have been the difference between coming first and second in the British gaming industry, because C16 owners would rather have spent £50 on an upgrade to a C64 than spend £130 on a new machine that wasn't technically better. So why did Commodore not go in this direction? Any ideas folks?
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Posted By
TMR
on 2004-11-11
21:02:18
 | Re: Commodore's market decisions in the 80s
The C16 wasn't really aimed at the Spectrum, the Speccy didn't have a major dominance outside the U.K. when the 264 series were being designed and, if the C16 was meant to compete, why give it 16K when the stock Speccy by 1984 was 48K?
i've always felt (i don't know if this is how it actually was and it's perhaps a little cynical of me) that the C16 was intended as a replacement for the VIC20 whilst the Plus/4 was to supercede the C64. And, if i am being cynical here, the reasoning behind the machines seems to be quite heavily based on financial issues; although the C64 was selling by the truckload it was expensive to produce due to the custom chips, the Plus/4 was much cheaper as a piece of hardware because most of the jobs farmed out to multiple ICs on the C64 board were handled by TED in the 264 series.
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Posted By
JamesC
on 2004-11-12
00:26:10
| Re: Commodore's market decisions in the 80s
From an American market point of view: the Plus/4 was not meant to replace the 64, but to replace the PET/CBM machines... business machines. In that respect, it succeeded. Commodore's last business machines were the Plus/4 and the B128 (of which the B128 were also quickly sold off as liquidation machines, as quickly as all the Tramiels were out of West Chester).
The 16 did indeed replace the VIC-20 here. However it was marketed as a 'starter computer', as the competition here was Timex/Sinclair and Atari. The 16 was sold at discount stores whereas the Plus/4 was sold at department stores and other retailers that specialized in Commodore machines.
Having two computers based around one design simplified things for Commodore, as then they only had to build TED machines and VIC-II machines..... no more original VICs, no more metal-cased machines..... and the software selection from Commodore itself was also simplified as they didn't have to publish word processors and programming languages for several different memory architectures.
The 264 series also gave Commodore's engineering department the experience with memory banking and fast transfers that they needed to design a true 64 upgrade (the 128). History may forget about Script/Plus and the 1551, but the lessons learned kept the VIC-II series alive longer than anyone ever thought it could survive.
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Posted By
MIK
on 2004-11-12
07:26:13
 | Re: Commodore's market decisions in the 80s
I believe if the C64 was released with 16k it would of killed the machine, much like the C16 did to the Plus/4. Kiled the machine as in limited 64k only software...
Its a different story in the UK. The C16 didn't last 5 minutes because it was being sold for £30 more than the Plus/4. Not only that the Plus/4 by xmas 1984 was being sold with its 11 games, 2 joysticks bundles all over the UK. There was a large TV promo going on air for the C16 at the time, but when you walked into the shop the Plus4 was sitting next to it, and thats how I got my Plus/4.
The plus/4 may of been or ment to be a business machine but it was being sold as a games machine. I would imagine at this time Commodore knew they f**ked up. 
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Posted By
TMR
on 2004-11-12
14:14:49
| Re: Commodore's market decisions in the 80s
Very true about a 16K C64 potentially messing the market up for the big machine, look what the C64 did for the C128 for example - 90% of C128 units sold probably never got into 128 mode after the initial couple of boot ups before the Commodore key at power on was discovered...
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2004-11-12
17:32:14
| Re: Commodore's market decisions in the 80s
"Commodore" (the company) and "market decisions" is an oxymoron 
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