Since I was there, and I saw this up-front and in the raw, I can tell you precisely why the Amiga failed.
Upper Management.
We engineers had big plans for the Amiga, like 24-bit graphics with a blitter per bitplane, a DSP, and other goodies that we dubbed with the code name: AAA.
We were working on this AAA chip set, which would’ve taken the Amiga to a whole new plane of existence for its time, but upper management smacked it down and ended development of that, and told us to do something “simpler”. And so we did — code name? AA.
Even the AA chipset didn’t suck too badly, and was still ahead of what was available at the time. But technology was never an issue for the Amiga. It was poor marketing decisions.
For example, Commodore once had a golden opportunity of getting the Amiga into Sears. Commodore “marketing” assed that up. Why? Sears wanted to list the Amiga in their catalogue, like they do all their products, but Commodore Marketing claimed it would make the Amiga look like “a toy”, and so forbade it.
As well, Sears didn’t need the Amiga as much as the Amiga needed Sears, and so it was dropped.
This is one of the biggest blunders Commodore made, in a long list of blunders that may have saved the company. Had the Amiga been introduced into Sears, that would’ve placed the Amiga in front of millions of people that never even heard of the Amiga before. It would’ve been there on display for them to play with and be amazed. And so the Amiga would’ve flown off the shelves. And Commodore would’ve lived to see another day.
Irving Gould drove Commodore into the ground. See: Irving Gould - The Money Man.
I had a real passion for the Amiga, and it was the one thing that liberated me from Windows 3.11 and Intel tech of the time.
Right around the time Commodore closed their doors, Windows NT came out, and I jumped on that. I was hoping to get into Unix development, but the one drive I had Unix — AmigaUNIX! — on, died. Yes, We had ported SVR5 Unix to the Amiga, which was also killed by upper management. This was a bonehead move, because at the time, students needing Unix machines for college could afford the much-cheaper Amiga than the other options available at the time — and said students would’ve carried the Amiga right into the business arena once they graduated and move on — you know, the same thing that happened with Apple.
Oh, that’s another story, because Commodore had the educational market at one point with their Commodore PET computer. They almost literally handed that market to Apple, and we all know what happened after that.
It’s scary to think where Commodore would be today had it not made such bone-headed decisions. It would probably be where Apple is today, and Apple would’ve become the footnote in history.
I have fond memories of the Amiga and its impressive graphics. And today, I have the RTX 2070 in my desktop computer. Yes, it can do real-time Ray Tracing. Back in my Commodore Amiga days, ray tracing was all the rage — but it generally took an hour or more to render a single ray-traced still for the smallish monitors of the time — 640x400. Now I have this beast that can do it in real-time to a UHD / 4K display. Who knows? Maybe they would be where Nvidia is today. Who knows?