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From: doug@terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Commodore vs. Atari
Message-ID: <691@terak.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-Aug-85 18:22:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: terak.691
Posted: Wed Aug 28 18:22:40 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 1-Sep-85 13:22:59 EDT
References: <268@ihnet.UUCP> <9900005@uiucdcsp>
Organization: Calcomp Display Products Division, Scottsdale, AZ, USA
Lines: 42

> Point #1:  Yes, Commodore has been outselling Atari.  Yet, IBM has been out-
>            selling both.  Why?  IBM gains two audiences; the ones who know
>            what they want at the start and buy big, and those that outgrow both
>            the 800 and C64 (notoriously weak machines by any NONBIASED standard)

Nonbiased??  The 800 and C64 are very strong machines, and the IBM PC
very weak, for those of us who use our home computers for game playing.
On the other hand, the PC clobbers the 800 and 64 for business
applications.

I don't have any figures here to back me up, but I believe that the PC
only outsells the 64 in $$ figures, not in number of units.  That's
easy to do when it costs ten times as much.

It's all a matter of perspective...

> Point #2:  Commodore slipped in the market last Christmas (and still is, by the
>            way) due to a serious fault in that company - they completely scrap
>            the old machine when a new one comes along.

If that was the correct explanation, we would expect to see the other
manufacturers profitting from sales to the "refugees".  It didn't happen
that way.  Commodore slipped in the market last Christmas because the
heyday of the home computer is over.  As did *all* micro manufacturers.
*Nobody* is getting rich off of micros any more.

I don't think one can defend the (implied) charge that Commodore is far
more likely to scrap an old machine when introducing a new one than
other manufacturers.  Of the micros available at the time the C64 was
announced, very few are still supported, and the C64 is one of them (and
the new C128 has a C64 compatibility mode).

IBM had to issue an (almost unprecedented) denial that it was about to
scrap the PC in favor of a "PC II".  And the Apple folks make no bones
about wanting to scrap the Apple ][ line, if they didn't need it in
order to cover the huge losses being rung up by the Mac (and Lisa and
Apple /// before it).

Rapid obsolescence has so far been a standard characteristic of the
micro market.  It's really not fair to single out any one company.
-- 
Doug Pardee -- CalComp -- {seismo!noao,decvax!noao,ihnp4}!terak!doug