Another Tramiel Mistake!

[mos6507]

I don't have the cd here now but I'll check it again in a few hours

 

 

I think you are referring to this.

[mos6507]

Brad had a meeting with Jack & co. at which time he placed a 7800 on the desk and prepared to give a review of the product status.  Jack leaned over, knocked the unit off the desk and stopped Brad in mid-sentence and said "We're a computer company now, we don't make videogames anymore..."  3 Days later Brad was fired...

 

What a dickhead he was.

 

Let's look at how they supported being a "computer company".

 

When Jack Tramiel took over, they already had a home computer at Atari, the XLs. No, it wasn't doing well and it was certainly handled badly by Warners, but I would argue it was in better shape than the console business, in fact I'm sure many like myself were Atari console owners who upgraded. There was a continuity in customer loyalty there.

 

Anyway, people don't remember that during the transition from 8-bit home computers to 16-bit computers that there was a really huge price gap. People just look at the specs and assume that everyone immediately threw their 8-bit machines in the trash the second the IBM PC and the Mac arrived on the scene. Not so! The new wave of computers were "going corporate" and were priced accordingly. By the mid 80s, 8-bit home computers had gone down to something like $150 for a 64K or 128K unit. VERY few computers were bought in the early days of the Apple II and TRS-80 when machines of that class were being sold for thousands. The golden days of the 8-bit platform was actually during the overlap years with the 16-bit systems because they became so cheap and accessible. Many people bought their first home computer at a time when that architecture was well over 5 years old, but they didn't care because it was all new and the next step up was hopelessly out of reach.

 

An IBM PC was what, $2,000 or something? And Macs and Amigas weren't that much cheaper. We're talking 1980s dollars here. And the PC had awful graphics and sound and the MAC was greyscale. The 16-bit sales were largely driven by the shift from terminal computing to PC computing in the workplace. Many home users, who were often still teens without a lot of buying power, saw fit to stick around with their 8-bit platforms until the clone market started to commoditize the PC and graphics card technology started to pick up in the early 90s.

 

So on the Commodore end, the C=64 still got a lot of support side by side with the Amiga on the high-end. Meanwhile, the Tramiels almost begrudgingly kept the Atari 8-bit on life support while really trying to ram the ST at us even though it really didn't feel that Atarilike.

 

If not for 3rd parties, mail-orders, usergroups, and BBSs keeping the fire going, , the Atari 8 would have died right at the crash instead of lasting until the early 90s.

 

Atari simply couldn't have afforded to alienate any of its existing userbase.

 

And the irony in all this is that, in the end, Atari wound up killing the ST computer line anyway and rolling the dice as a console-only company with the Jaguar.

[hookem]

And the award for "most dated thread response" goes to...

913576[/snapback]

LOL, mind the two-year gap.