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The Amiga: Why did it fail so hard in the United States?


empsolo

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The Amiga seems to be regarded as the best beloved computer from the late eighties and early nineties by those who used it. Especially for being a powerhouse in graphics. And yet this computer and it's Pseudo-Sister in the Atari ST failed to crack 6% of the market share in the US combined against it's rivals in IBM and Apple. So what went wrong for Commodore in the USA? Why did this computer or the ST for that matter fail so spectacularly here in the US. Was there a single thing that Atari and Commodore did or was it more of a compendium of unforced errors on either company's part?

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In EU there was a tradition of "gaming" home computers that dwarfed consoles, so the passage from 8bits to 16bits was almost friction-less (from C64/Speccy mostly to Amiga/ST).

In the US the gaming market was in the hands of Nintendo mostly and the 16bits were still seen as glorified gaming machines ... which mostly they were (albeit with nice gfx/sound for the time).

 

I believe in the US they really stood little chance while in EU it was the opposite, consoles took a while and IBM PC compat (attack of the clones) didn't get palatable until the EGA/VGA timeframe when prices also started to drop and a 386 could run around a stock Amiga/ST in terms of raw computing power. The 8086s were just not up to par and cost an arm and a leg once you factored in a decent amount of memory a decent gfx card and a sound board and an almost mandatory HDD, even the mouse had to be bought separately, but by the early-mid '90s there was no contest.

 

So I believe traditionally the US market saw the PC as taking the office computer at home as a way to keep working (workaholic anyone?) leaving little room for the more "hipster" and graphically endowed alternatives.

 

PS: to be fair I'm speculating here as even if I'm quite familiar of the EU market of those years (part-time working in computer shop and such) I knew very little of the US one until the PC became dominating in EU too.

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I also have the feeling that PCs and compatibles dropped sooner and faster in price in the US than they did in Europe, so what was a slightly expensive but viable option for you, was utopia for us over here. The Atari ST and shortly after the Amiga were at least priced so a teenager could afford them after saving some money or getting an expensive birthday gift.

 

That, and the mantra I keep repeating that Americans are traditionally known to spend more money than Europeans do. You settle for nothing but the best, no matter the cost, while we as a collective - and mind you, Europe is a highly fractioned continent with many different cultures - rather want to get a cheaper product that just fits the bill, even if it has less than impressive specs. It is not due to random that e.g. the ZX Spectrum was one of the top two computers, not only in the UK but also elsewhere across Europe, while it likely yielded a WTF? moment when presented to American potential buyers. It is not due to random that Apple ][ users in the US fondly remembers it as a decent gaming computer, while we over here think of it as a rather expensive business computer that very few teenagers would even have a chance in Hell to be able to afford. The Amiga and ST should be fitted into this model.

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Just my thoughts on this.

I think the Nes was the Amiga's downfall in the US. Also the Amiga had no Mario/Zelda type mascot and the arcade ports were mainly rubbish with a few exceptions.

In the UK the Nes was a bit like the Wii U up until Mario 3, TMNT, and the games were expensive, so most kids either upgraded to an Amiga or ST from Spectrum&C64, or wanted a Amiga/ST.

Edited by D.Daniels
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The Amiga failed because of very poor customer service in North America. Somehow they thought they did not have to service customers after the sale. There was alot of bickering within Commodore and the Amiga corporation in the direction they wanted to go during and after the A4000 (T) came out and sales were slipping. Commodore wanted to push into the business market but by that time the Amiga was really known just as a gaming machine and a great option for small TV studios.

 

In the late 80s early 90s the Amiga was only second to the Macitosh in sales in Europe but like has been said IBM took the North American market and Commodore lost ground fast.

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We touched on this a bit in another thread. No 16 bit computer did well in the US. People didn't really have a need to upgrade from what they already had for the kinds of tasks they were doing (this was pre-internet), and game consoles were what most people played games on at the time. The NES/SNES/Genesis were huge here around the time that Commodore was pushing the Amiga and Atari the ST.

 

It was when the 386 hit that IBM PC compatibles really started taking off. That was 1986, but prices started really coming down around 1987-90. So computing-wise, the Amiga and ST were also competing against that.

 

Having lived through all the iterations of computers since basically the beginning (I was a pretty prototypical 80's computer geek for most of the decade), I can just tell you anecdotally that while everyone was impressed with the Amiga's capabilities, there just didn't seem to be much that average people could *do* with it. I remember one of my friends got one, and he actually had kind of an "unboxing party" before unboxing YouTube videos were even a glimmer in anyone's eye. He hooked it up and we all oooh'd and aaah'd at the GUI, but all I really remember was just him throwing windows around to show the multitasking. The way it worked was really cool, but none of the actual software he showed us left any sort of impression.

 

I think by around 1988/89, the thinking was that if you wanted to play games, you bought a game console, and if you wanted to do serious work, you either used what you already had or you bought a PC or compatible. PC's already had tons of software available for them at that point, and not for nothing but they did also have quite a few games already too. It didn't seem like a shaky platform without a lot of support like the Amiga was, and we all knew that it was more than just one company so it was unlikely to go away.

 

I kept using my Apple II until 1993, though, but I was very late to the PC party. I was in college then and by that time at least 3 of my roommates (I had 5) already had PC's. I had to convince my dad that I couldn't do real work on an Apple II. He initially didn't understand why.

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We touched on this a bit in another thread. No 16 bit computer did well in the US. People didn't really have a need to upgrade from what they already had for the kinds of tasks they were doing (this was pre-internet), and game consoles were what most people played games on at the time. The NES/SNES/Genesis were huge here around the time that Commodore was pushing the Amiga and Atari the ST.

 

It was when the 386 hit that IBM PC compatibles really started taking off. That was 1986, but prices started really coming down around 1987-90. So computing-wise, the Amiga and ST were also competing against that.

 

Having lived through all the iterations of computers since basically the beginning (I was a pretty prototypical 80's computer geek for most of the decade), I can just tell you anecdotally that while everyone was impressed with the Amiga's capabilities, there just didn't seem to be much that average people could *do* with it. I remember one of my friends got one, and he actually had kind of an "unboxing party" before unboxing YouTube videos were even a glimmer in anyone's eye. He hooked it up and we all oooh'd and aaah'd at the GUI, but all I really remember was just him throwing windows around to show the multitasking. The way it worked was really cool, but none of the actual software he showed us left any sort of impression.

 

I think by around 1988/89, the thinking was that if you wanted to play games, you bought a game console, and if you wanted to do serious work, you either used what you already had or you bought a PC or compatible. PC's already had tons of software available for them at that point, and not for nothing but they did also have quite a few games already too. It didn't seem like a shaky platform without a lot of support like the Amiga was, and we all knew that it was more than just one company so it was unlikely to go away.

 

I kept using my Apple II until 1993, though, but I was very late to the PC party. I was in college then and by that time at least 3 of my roommates (I had 5) already had PC's. I had to convince my dad that I couldn't do real work on an Apple II. He initially didn't understand why.

 

That makes a lot of sense, can see the that the Amiga in the US was trapped between 2 markets, which were more established or common. In the UK the Amiga was kind of the number choice to have until the Snes and Megadrive took over, and you could say put a nail in the home computer market.

Edited by D.Daniels
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Having lived through all the iterations of computers since basically the beginning (I was a pretty prototypical 80's computer geek for most of the decade), I can just tell you anecdotally that while everyone was impressed with the Amiga's capabilities, there just didn't seem to be much that average people could *do* with it. I remember one of my friends got one, and he actually had kind of an "unboxing party" before unboxing YouTube videos were even a glimmer in anyone's eye. He hooked it up and we all oooh'd and aaah'd at the GUI, but all I really remember was just him throwing windows around to show the multitasking. The way it worked was really cool, but none of the actual software he showed us left any sort of impression.

 

That was precisely my problem. During the weeks and months leading up to me getting the Amiga I rambled on about the processing power, the multi-chip custom chipset, the GUI, the whole package. I would have been THE perfect sale rep.

 

And then the bomb dropped. I bought the machine home, and tried desperately to impress my friends and even myself. I had like 1 or 2 commercial games, Marble Madness, and F/A 18 or something. And a couple of lame arcade game ports. I swear these ports could be written pixel for pixel, in BASIC, on a previous 8-bit machine. That bad. OR, perhaps, totally wasting what potential there was in the Amiga hardware.

 

I felt like a stage performer who had forgotten half the routine and was making stuff up impromptu. Nobody was laughing. And all I could do was push crap around on the desktop, show some hi-res pictures, and play some demoscene demos. Basically useless stuff. I was beginning to feel like I had been had.

 

And to make matters worse, my real work on the Apple II never transitioned smoothly to the new platform. And when it did, I couldn't find any application suitable for me. Word processing was actually smoother and faster on the II than this new state-of-the-art 16-bit rig.

 

The Amiga, unfortunately, didn't inspire my imagination with visions of science experiments and space travel. No space colonies, no fantasy lunar lander adventures. No astronomy or deep space adventures. Not like the Apple II and Atari 400/800 did.

 

I felt the Amiga had a lot of internal complexity and it was getting in the way of "pure processing". Simply too much excess baggage. And while a few years later I got an immensely more complex (by transistor count) 486 PC. I felt the PC was freewheeling. The processor power could be felt as 50MHz of number crunching force plowed through anything and everything. Fucking custom chipsets be damned. Do it in generic logic and software!

 

This is not a hate post. It is a post telling exactly how I recall and experienced the Amiga back in the day. If my experience was any different I would say so. The Amiga was good for one thing, for me, however. And that was the early paint programs in conjunction with digi-view digitizer. Not a game, not a wow! application. But quite intriguing to me at the time.

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That was precisely my problem. During the weeks and months leading up to me getting the Amiga I rambled on about the processing power, the multi-chip custom chipset, the GUI, the whole package. I would have been THE perfect sale rep.

 

And then the bomb dropped. I bought the machine home, and tried desperately to impress my friends and even myself. I had like 1 or 2 commercial games, Marble Madness, and F/A 18 or something. And a couple of lame arcade game ports. I swear these ports could be written pixel for pixel, in BASIC, on a previous 8-bit machine. That bad. OR, perhaps, totally wasting what potential there was in the Amiga hardware.

 

I felt like a stage performer who had forgotten half the routine and was making stuff up impromptu. Nobody was laughing. And all I could do was push crap around on the desktop, show some hi-res pictures, and play some demoscene demos. Basically useless stuff. I was beginning to feel like I had been had.

 

And to make matters worse, my real work on the Apple II never transitioned smoothly to the new platform. And when it did, I couldn't find any application suitable for me. Word processing was actually smoother and faster on the II than this new state-of-the-art 16-bit rig.

 

The Amiga, unfortunately, didn't inspire my imagination with visions of science experiments and space travel. No space colonies, no fantasy lunar lander adventures. No astronomy or deep space adventures. Not like the Apple II and Atari 400/800 did.

 

I felt the Amiga had a lot of internal complexity and it was getting in the way of "pure processing". Simply too much excess baggage. And while a few years later I got an immensely more complex (by transistor count) 486 PC. I felt the PC was freewheeling. The processor power could be felt as 50MHz of number crunching force plowed through anything and everything. Fucking custom chipsets be damned. Do it in generic logic and software!

 

This is not a hate post. It is a post telling exactly how I recall and experienced the Amiga back in the day. If my experience was any different I would say so. The Amiga was good for one thing, for me, however. And that was the early paint programs in conjunction with digi-view digitizer. Not a game, not a wow! application. But quite intriguing to me at the time.

 

I agree with what you said, here in the UK they were practically used as games machines, even know I guess parents thought homework could be done it never was, and all our schools in the UK used BBC Micro's or the Acorn. But if you take into account the Amiga came out in 85, had it been affordable, it was ahead of its time, but it took too long to come down in price.

Edited by D.Daniels
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The Amiga seems to be regarded as the best beloved computer from the late eighties and early nineties by those who used it. Especially for being a powerhouse in graphics. And yet this computer and it's Pseudo-Sister in the Atari ST failed to crack 6% of the market share in the US combined against it's rivals in IBM and Apple. So what went wrong for Commodore in the USA? Why did this computer or the ST for that matter fail so spectacularly here in the US. Was there a single thing that Atari and Commodore did or was it more of a compendium of unforced errors on either company's part?

 

I don't agree it failed in the US in the traditional sense. It was more or less the de facto number 2 for a few years, especially in terms of computer games, after the Amiga 500 was released. The problem for the US market was that PC Compatibles were already pretty much the de facto standard and increasing in power and capabilities every year. It was only a matter of time before PCs surpassed Amiga's in audio-visual performance (the most compelling reason to own one), that Amigas, and anything else not named Macintosh (which carved out a tiny, if sustainable niche), would become completely irrelevant. The same thing happened in Europe and everywhere else, of course, but it took longer due to different market conditions. We all know that the rise of PC DOS and later, Windows, was an inevitability, for a variety of factors. Although both Atari and Commodore (and even Apple) could have executed many things far better, there are no realistic scenarios where they could have stopped what was happening on the PC side.

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I think by around 1988/89, the thinking was that if you wanted to play games, you bought a game console, and if you wanted to do serious work, you either used what you already had or you bought a PC or compatible. PC's already had tons of software available for them at that point, and not for nothing but they did also have quite a few games already too. It didn't seem like a shaky platform without a lot of support like the Amiga was, and we all knew that it was more than just one company so it was unlikely to go away.

 

I kept using my Apple II until 1993, though, but I was very late to the PC party. I was in college then and by that time at least 3 of my roommates (I had 5) already had PC's. I had to convince my dad that I couldn't do real work on an Apple II. He initially didn't understand why.

 

The same for me. I wanted the Amiga to succeed so much I often times embarrassed myself touting it's capabilities and features. I was always shot down by many many people saying it's an oversized videogame. Or that if its as good as you say, why aren't professional manufacturing or accounting departments picking up on it? I couldn't win!

 

At a couple of times I remember trying my damnedest to migrate all my Apple II activities and data to the Amiga. A pain, an annoyance. And in retrospect I'm glad it didn't happen. On the two occasions I put the Apple II away it came right back out again within the month. Only when I got the 486 in 92/93 was I able to retire the Apple II to "collector" status.

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The Amiga hardly existed in the US marketplace. The C64 was sold everywhere, and made a huge impact, while the Amiga was sold almost nowhere. By the time people that had a C64 were ready to move on, or never had a computer, the PC was being sold everywhere, so the Amiga never had a chance. Packard Bell and Acer were everywhere and played Doom.

 

It was only early adopters and hobbyists who knew about it through word of mouth that bought one. I got my Amiga when the 500 came out but only because I heard about it from a friend (it was affordable enough to trade in a nice C64 system and buy one).

 

I later worked for a dealer in a fairly large city (Atlanta, and we were the only Commodore dealer left) from about 92-96 (the later years) and all of our revenue was Video Toaster sales. If not for that, they would hardly exist. When the 1200 came out, we did sell quite a few of them, but that trickled off by 93 or so...

Edited by R.Cade
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The trouble with Amiga and the ST in the US market also came fro Jack Tramiel. The price drops on the C64, wheren't good for the shopowners selling them. So there was a lot of bad blood between Tramiel and the sellers.

Since by the time the Amiga hit the market Tramiel had moved to Atari. Atari also had a bad name because of the videogame crash, so sellers where reluctant selling stuff from Atari.

Also Commodore was trying to sell the Amiga as a business machine, but the rise of the PC prevented them getting a big share on that market.

Had they shifted from selling the Amiga as a business machine to a games machine, like they did in Europe, things might have been different.

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Sigh.

 

I guess i'm one of a handful of Americans that genuinely saw the Amiga 1000 as a workstation, and not just a C64 on rocket fuel...

 

Before the Amiga, I had been using 8-bit machines at home, but had access to a smattering of minicomputer and workstation hardware, and when I saw the Amiga 1000, my jaw hit the floor, because here was a machine that could push pixels faster than any Sun or SGI that I saw at the time, for....1/10th the price.

 

I rushed out and got one, and I had an Amiga on my desk for the next 13 years, because the PCs took so long to catch up.

 

The Amiga failed because Commodore simply didn't know how to market it, nor did they have the money to market it, as C= was hemorrhaging operating capital by the time they needed to market the machine (they had spent what surplus they had, to buy the Amiga and its team, and didn't see the wisdom in crafting an effective marketing campaign...so Apple ate their lunch, while the PCs simply beat the Amigas in numbers.)

 

more to come later, but I am tired.

 

-Thom

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Everyone wanted an Amiga, but nobody bought one.

 

Aside from just pure random luck, which I think explains more than we'd like to imagine, there a lot of reasons why the Amiga didn't succeed.

 

I think the single biggest reason was that PC clones got a lot cheaper, and it was easier to pirate software for them because people could just bring home what they had at work. And then when Wolfenstein (and later Doom) came out, PCs even became better at gaming, so there was no need to have an Amiga for that. PCs had killer apps like WordPerfect.

 

Earlier on the NES/Genesis/SNES games were often quite a bit better than Amiga games, anyways, and most everyone had one of those systems.

 

Amiga prices came down too slowly, and hardware development advanced too slowly.

 

The C64 stayed popular for much longer than anyone expected, and Commodore mismanagement did the rest.

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The trouble with Amiga and the ST in the US market also came fro Jack Tramiel. The price drops on the C64, wheren't good for the shopowners selling them. So there was a lot of bad blood between Tramiel and the sellers.

Since by the time the Amiga hit the market Tramiel had moved to Atari. Atari also had a bad name because of the videogame crash, so sellers where reluctant selling stuff from Atari.

Also Commodore was trying to sell the Amiga as a business machine, but the rise of the PC prevented them getting a big share on that market.

Had they shifted from selling the Amiga as a business machine to a games machine, like they did in Europe, things might have been different.

 

I feel the Amiga would have struggled to compete with the Nes over your side even if they had shifted from selling the Amiga as a business machine to a games machine.

Then in 89 you got the Genesis and that would have made the Amiga quite redundant. Over here home computers died with the Snes/MegaDrive era. Yeah the Amiga held on very strong during that era but the Snes/Megadrive had taken over. And then came PC's and PlayStation.

Edited by D.Daniels
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Over here in Europe the Amiga started to sell, after the 500 came out, the price dropped and was sold in gamepack bundles. Here in the Netherlands, consoles wheren't very populair. Due to the price of the games. They where twice or more expensive then homecomputer games. For me the console market picked up after the release of the Playstation, because it became to expensive to keep your pc up to date at that time.

Games on the Amiga where also not that hard to copy, using xcopy. And a lot of games where cracked by the later demoscene programmers, adding trainers to the games.

A factor that may have contributed to the lack of Amiga's used as business machines, may also be the difficulty of getting data from your old hardware, over to the Amiga, like others have mentioned.

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Well, coming from a person who was there at the time and purchased the Amiga 500 brand new from "The Program Store" in 1989, I can say without a doubt (at least on the east coast) this computer was not a failure at all. Lots of software was being released at the time. I also purchased a 520ST and was REALLY disappointed in it as it felt like a scaled down A500. The graphics were "almost there" and the sound outright sucked ass. I guess if the 520ST were my first 16-bit machine I may have felt otherwise...but maybe not after using the Amiga. I used that computer (the Amiga that is) for years for just about everything. The real problem is that is was not taken seriously as a "professional" computer. My friends dad ran his business on a C64 for years and moved to a CGA IBM PC. Four color crap and beeping sounds and coming from a from a machine (the C64) that was way better in the multimedia arena in my opinion. But it didn't matter because it was a "professional" computer and was meant for business, not multimedia.

 

It was like the word "multimedia" meant you were not doing your best at "professional" work. We now know they absolutely go hand in hand but in those days a graphic and sound powerhouse computer was considered a "game machine". The Amiga was designed as a game machine to start that is true, but it was a workhorse of a computer and few people I know used it that way. As for games, it kicked ass. The game consoles of the time may have had some of the graphics (Genesis uses the M68000 processor) but that sound coming out of that machine is just awesome.

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There are many subtle pluses about the IBM PC (for professional use) that it would go far beyond this thread to discuss them all. But the limited color and sound capabilities of the PC meant that efforts would be, had to be, focused on making great application programs. Developers were not wasting time on making dialog boxes pretty and 3D and having 10 different shades of color.

 

They were instead paying attention to the task at hand.

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CGA PC's were getting to be uncommon even by the time of the Amiga's initial release, though. Through most of the Amiga's lifespan, the PC had equivalent or better graphics. EGA was launched in 1984, VGA in 1987 and SVGA in 1989, and graphics accelerators were being improved all the time to take advantage of these standards. So you could still buy a CGA PC in 1985 or 1986, but it would have been considered old, basically obsolete tech. I'm sure a lot of people did still buy them if all they wanted to do was run spreadsheets or database apps. But I don't think you can indict the entire PC culture as a result of that; even back then, there were just a lot of choices in terms of PC's.

 

PC's designed for graphics kept pace with and eventually surpassed Amiga graphics. By 1993 or so, when I got my first PC, you could get better graphics than an Amiga even in a low-end PC (that's what I had, some cheap Packard Bell).

 

What the Amiga always outdid the PC at was multitasking. That was always the impressive thing about it, and the thing no other machine of its time could really do, or at least not that well. The Mac had only cooperative multitasking and Windows was being run on top of DOS in those days and had all sorts of problems as a result. The Amiga was designed from the ground up for preemptive multitasking and I think everyone was jealous of that. In practice, though, most people just didn't see the need for running 4 or 5 programs at once. It was ahead of its time. Nowadays people often run *hundreds* of little programs at once without even realizing it (check your task manager), and I personally am almost never below five or six full-blown user-invoked apps running on my desktop, plus about 50 Chrome and Firefox tabs! But in the early days of multitasking, people just didn't really see the point.

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In 1989, the Amiga 500 in Europe (UK really) became a top seller when Commodore released 'the Batman pack' on par with the Batman film showing in movie theaters.

Everyone, including me, went for the Batman game packed Amiga computer (also included an excellent version of New Zealand Story).

Excellent move on Commodore's part, it flew off the shelves. From then on the ST was history.

Edited by high voltage
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There are many subtle pluses about the IBM PC (for professional use) that it would go far beyond this thread to discuss them all. But the limited color and sound capabilities of the PC meant that efforts would be, had to be, focused on making great application programs. Developers were not wasting time on making dialog boxes pretty and 3D and having 10 different shades of color.

 

They were instead paying attention to the task at hand.

 

I'm not sure I agree with the premise. I don't think one follows the other. I think the breadth of productivity apps was separate from the gaming aspect. Tons of games were made for the platform to go along with the productivity stuff. Relative audio-visual quality - as long as there's something there (i.e., not CP/M, which was mostly text) - never stopped game creation. Just look at all the stuff made for the TRS-80 or even Apple II. I do agree though that PC gaming REALLY took off after the introduction of EGA cards and Ad Lib sound, and obviously hit its unstoppable groove with VGA and Sound Blaster, but it's not like there wasn't a ton of stuff that took advantage of CGA (or even Monochrome) and PC speaker sound. It only stopped being outclassed by other systems (for gaming) once the VGA era began.

 

Anyway, the fact that the first PC came from IBM had a lot to do with business adoption, as did the ever growing number of compatibles, starting with the popularity of the first Compaq. Commodore, Atari, and even Apple were never going to have the same type of gravitas and get the same type of business adoption that would have led to the same type of business apps.

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