Commodore went out of business in 94, 95 amiga(technologies) announced that they would move to powerpc and in 97 there where released products.
Mac was a couple of years earlier but just that, a couple of years in 94 when commodore went down.
en.wikipedia.org
Atari only had a lot of music folk because pc sound hardware was unobtanium back then, same for video hardware and the amiga.
As soon as pc hardware started to drop rapidly in price it was game over for them.
The Amiga was too much tied to its components, it was a too closed up environment, there wasn't really any reasonable way to make it work with pc hardware so it would have become more and more expensive compared to the PC hardware.
Atari was too much of an open system, they were running tos as an OS that people could also run on a dos machine, if atari made a system with pc hardware it would just have been another ibm clone and the competition between those at that time was fierce.
It's easy to say mismanagement with perfect 20/20 hindsight vision but the PC clone wars was something that even most PC companies died in, we had something like a dozen large CPU makers in the 90ies and now we have two with one of them barely holding on.
About Commodore: a couple years in computing, especially in the ‘90s, was death though. But even accepting that you’re still not comparing a healthy Commodore against Apple and seeing if they survived. You are comparing a healthy Apple (they got in bad shape later) against a dead and then barely revived, disorganized Amiga with minimal resources. So Commodore didn’t convert Workbench to PowerPC and lost their market thereafter.... Commodore died, their market moved on mostly, and the shambling corpse of the Amiga began to try to win them back after people had shifted to Microcrap and Apple. That’s not really the same though.
TOS couldn’t run on a DOS machine unless it was converted and, to my knowledge, that has never been done. I am almost sure that you’re thinking of GEM. That wasn’t the OS, it was the Graphics Environment Manager.... hence the name.
Of course saying mismanagement is looking at things with hindsight. My entire point was that had different, better choices been made they might have survived. Also, some of the mistakes Atari and Commodore made weren’t necessarily the sort only recognized in hindsight. Going back to the purchase of Federated, there were massive warning signs that it was a bad purchase. They lost a couple hundred million dollars because they didn’t do proper due diligence and ignored the due diligence that was performed AND ignored advice some of their own execs were giving. It was so stupid.....
Anyway, part of my point is that these companies might have survived and Atri had avenues to survive other than the ST and TOS. Here are some:
Atari had the Portfolio (a handheld DOS compatible computer) that they could have built on. It was designed by DIP but they could have bought this technology instead of merely selling it as a label. Since they had already developed their own handwriting recognition software (see the STylus) they could’ve eventually evolved this tech in a variety of ways that alone would’ve saved the company.
I mentioned Blossom before. They had their own graphics technology but never sought to build in it and sell it as a graphics option.
The Atari Lynx was fairly successful, but the Gameboy‘s numbers were WAY better (Like 9:1 better). Atari simply refused to adopt loss leaders, better marketing, and more investment in games. The thing is that had the Lynx been the market leader, something entirely obtainable when the Lynx was released, Atari could’ve survived on just that product for about a decade. As it is, the Lynx brought in only $25m a year instead of the $250m+ it could have. This would e been a game changer for Atari. They were a company with total revenues that, minus Federated, only topped $250m maybe once or twice from 1985 and 1996.
There are some other things as well. What made me such an Atari homer back then was I was always amazed that such a relatively small company managed to create so much technology. But it stretched them very thin and the Tramiels weren‘t always the best at reading the tea leaves and knowing where to take chances and where to cut losses.
One last thing: you’re certainly right that dropping PC hardware would’ve made this scenario bleak. However, I don’t think it is true that that would’ve doomed Atari’s music market. You know why? Take a look at what used Atari computers are going for on eBay. They sell for more now than they ever have and it is because musicians are hoarding them. Even now, over 25 years after making their last computer, musicians still prefer the ST and Falcon. There is an interesting article on this if you’re interested. Apparently the ST has a nearly perfect clock and this keep oddities from creeping into MIDI recordings. Contemporary computers, despite everything, are still inferior to the ST for music. Now I don’t know if Atari could’ve kept making new computers like this, but it is food for thought.
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