The Amiga was like a dream machine when it hit the market, most people I knew had C64's at the time and the Amiga was just light years ahead in terms of capabilities. A few people I knew had PC's and the Amiga absolutely left them in the dust for years, it only really seemed to catch up around 1993 once Doom hit and VGA / SVGA cards became somewhat more affordable, that was roughly eight years after the Amiga was released.<p>All of that being said, I lived in a part of the world in the 80/90's where PC tech was very expensive at the time, and the humble Amiga was very reasonably priced in comparison, it had just enough wow factor initially to make you believe, with lots of custom chips to support that ambition. It was the sort of computer that was able to crossover into every space mostly. If you lived in the US, you were likely trying to decide between a Tandy PC and Apple or a console which were way more affordable on home soil and already had a large catalogue of titles and mainstream developer support and business use (for the PC).<p>Where I think things went wrong for the Amiga, aside from Irving Gould and his rather hopeless management squad, was that the Amiga was marketed badly and poorly positioned in the US, with Commodore having a somewhat sketchy relationship with smaller computers stores across the country which almost guaranteed they got a bit less sunshine compared to other devices in store (thanks in part to Jack Tramiel and his aggressive price cutting tactics with the C64 in the early 80's). Europe, Australia, and South Africa all had brilliant marketing and distribution in comparison, and it was thanks to these markets the machine endured as long as it did.<p>The Amiga however ended up fighting too many battles on too many fronts and had very poor strategic direction in general. They needed R&D badly and a decent amount of it to maintain a hardware advantage at a low cost price point, instead they got rid of many of their great hardware engineers and specialists when their initial project had finished so they could save a buck and ultimately seeded their talent to the competition...<p>They should've had a VGA or better machine out to market by 1990, which they didn't and that was a major loss in terms of the hardware game. PAL and NTSC Amiga machines were also different beasts, with the PAL machines coming out on top in terms of resolution, compatibility and with more developer support in general.<p>But it's real losing hands (and there were a few) were:
1. Too many frequent revisions of it's main product which were superseded shortly after - Amiga 500+ or Amiga 600 anyone?
2. No cartridge or card slot while fighting a battle against consoles for market share and not having the foresight to build a low cost standardized adapter that could've been used as one (via the almost never used SCSI connector).
3. Releasing the CD32 Console, but not releasing an Amiga 1200 CD drive or the same capabilities across their all their home desktops (i.e. Akiko chip and CD32 firmware).
4. Releasing an upgraded version of Workbench / bios which killed compatibility with a third of Amiga's back catalogue of software titles (that was bright).
5. Having different resolutions and cpu speeds between countries for the same product - believe it or not there's a way to separate voltage speeds from the CPU frequency, and to have resolutions that can be complimentary across PAL and NTSC regions (just ask Nintendo and Sega), and even more amazingly if you just add a spot of frame skipping into your NTSC title it can work just fine in PAL at full speed.
6. RGB 15khz is great, but not properly implemented to support higher resolutions, so everything looked a super flickery when you went high res - it was basically a feature you couldn't use or had to suffer through if you did use it (Until the Amber Chip appeared on the A3000 / A4000 range).
7. The HAM mode was revolutionary but was extremely difficult to use except for the odd digitized image - another feature that people couldn't use, and wasn't made easier to use...
8. Chip ram should've been the only RAM in the system and had a faster bus speed to support normal transport speeds across memory. It was bad because it was very limited.
9. No upgrades across the sound channels or quality / frequency.
and lastly...
10. Commodore's main bread butter with the Amiga was with the desktop hobbyist home user - this segment should've been it's no 1 priority and been given first class treatment all the way. The UK and German offices understood this, but not in the US with the final nail in the coffin being the poor launch sales of the CD32 in the US (Went great in the UK). This was supported by a lack of killer titles upon release such as (Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat) and the general apathy to the Commodore brand in the US overall due to years of neglect and bad decisions.<p>The beautiful Amiga died because of idiocy and neglect - Commodore was doomed to die, it was just a rotten shame that the Amiga computer line went with it.