Xref: utzoo comp.sys.amiga.advocacy:14 comp.sys.amiga:76204 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!vsi1!zorch!mykes From: mykes@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Mike Schwartz) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: The Future of Commodore. Message-ID: <1991Jan10.034113.21163@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 10 Jan 91 03:41:13 GMT References: <1991Jan9.080507.353@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 50 A friend at work told me that he read in yesterday's Mercury News that CBM posted a major loss last quarter and had laid off hundreds of employees and engineers. Any truth to this? By the way, when Sadaam invaded Kuwait, the stock market dropped a bunch. Commodore was at about $9 and dropped to about $4. As recently as 2 weeks ago, the stock was at $10. Why would the stock go 250% up right before CBM announced a major loss and layoffs. Commodore really needs to focus on getting Business software available to the public. It is really embarassing that the machine has been around for 6 years and you still can't get a half decent WYSIWYG word processor that prints near Mac-quality documents on a laser printer from ANY manufacturer. Couldn't CBM pay Microsoft $30 Million for source to Microsoft word and port it? Couldn't they hire 3 or 4 guys who could just make the one piece of software that people will start using the machine for? It seems to me that the current products are all video oriented and even if these products are excellent, the Amiga can only be considered a machine used by a vast minority of hobbyists and video game junkies. Commodore seems to want to make a Unix machine real bad, but it looks like the Unix market is not really doing that well and is not a real good market to be going for. Sun was going to make a new public offering (stock market) before Sadaam screwed up our economy but decided against it because they couldn't get a decent price for the stock. You see, the industry analysts just don't think that Unix is booming... Commodore, you need to get your CD ROM machine out and make it cheap. You need to have a FIRE SALE on machines so you can get the price down to the point where people buying Nintendo and other game machines will start to consider buying the Amiga 500. The CD ROM machine is a brilliant piece of engineering, but it costs a huge amount of money to develop games that take up hundreds of megabytes and the only way anyone would invest the money is if they could sell a few hundred thousand at a time. If NEC can't sell a CD ROM machine at $400, can CBM sell one at $1000 and create any kind of market? NO WAY JOSE. Everyone who reads the Amiga newsgroups knows how great the Amiga is, but when Apple or IBM or many other IBM Clone manufacturers can sell more machines in a week than CBM can in a year, the industry will continue to look down their noses at the Amiga and ridicule it. The Atari 800 was the best 8-bit machine you could buy, but it went by the wayside and was defeated by the C64. The ONLY reason was price. At $199, people will buy a lot of machines. At $500, they won't, unless it is the same thing they use at work. The Amiga is the best 32-bit machine around, but it will continue to putter along and CBM will flounder as long as the Amiga does not do the things that other computers do well. This is true even though the Amiga does things the other computers can't do at all. I love the Amiga and want to see it succeed. Get your act together guys!