A final burst of Commodore nostalgia

(picture by Bill Bertram)

Earlier this year we told you how Jourik's Commodore 64 brought out the geek out of everybody at Boondoggle (well erm i-merge at that time). In a sudden burst of Commodore-mania I bought a copy of "On the Edge - The spectacular rise and fall of Commodore" which I I just finished reading yesterday. It turned out to be a fascinating read, because it discusses all the "serious" business, technology and political issues that weren't on my radar when I was a gameplaying teenager in 1985. For example :

- the perpetual war between marketing and engineering. Despite the fact that Commodore was mainly engineering driven, the success of the Commodore 64 (17 million sold, during its 12 year lifespan) was the result of a joint effort of a couple of visionary engineers and one of the most powerful advertising campaigns of the 80s.

- founder of Commodore Jack Tramiel's sleek sense of business, famous for his cut-throat business deals. Negotiating a one-off licence for Microsoft Basic 2.0 which came along all 17 million Commodore's 64, meaning Microsoft never made one dollar off the success of the C=64.

- how Commodore almost incidentally created a market for homecomputing following Tramiel's rallying cry "Computers for the masses, not the classes" with the VIC-20 and the C=64. Then due to greed, company politics and mismanagement failed to make a success out of the technologically superior Amiga in the second part of the 80s.

If you want to have a quick read through Commodore's history, this Wikipedia-article is pretty good.

The spectacular rise and fall of Commodore is most of all a homage that wants to set the record straight about what really happened at the start of the homecomputer-revolution. For that matter, the inside flap resumes the author's pitch quite welll :

Between 1975 and 1994, Commodore had astounding success in the nascent personal computer business. Amid the the chaos and infighting, Commodore was able to achieve some remarkable industry firsts. They were the first to show a personal computer, even before Apple and Radio Shack. They sold a million computers before anyone else. No single computer has sold more than the Commodore 64. The first true multimedia computer, the Amiga, came from Commodore. Yet with all these milestones, Commodore receives almost no credit as a pioneer.

A large part of Commodore's unstable success and it sudden fall can be attributed to their almost exclusive focus on cost-effectiveness and distribution (Commodore was the first to sell its computers via K-Mart & Sears in the US). Commodore however never really had a vision on marketing & advertising. Apple in contrast was exactly the opposite. Throughout much of the 80s their underpowered and overpriced computers were outsold by Commodore 10:1. But they constantly touted spectacular (but exaggerated) sales figures, while Steve Jobs established the visionary image of Apple. A fact that remains unmentioned in "The spectacular rise & fall of Commodore" about Apple is that Apple had somebody like Guy Kawasaki on board who successfully introduced the concept of evangelism to the computer business.

If Commodore thought about advertising, they followed the text book with hefty TV budgets and single minded product claims. One can only dream about how Commodore would have fared with somebody like Guy Kawasaki on board to evangelise the Amiga, which in 1985 was 1 or 2 generations ahead of the black and white 128k Macintosh.

Click below to watch some of the milestones from the short advertising reel of Commodore.

A commercial from the VIC-20 launch campaign, endorsed by William Shatner. The story goes that he was so impressed by the VIC-20 during the shooting because it was the first working computer he ever saw... Besides using a endorsment figure that resonated with the target consumer, Commodore made a smart move by positioning the VIC-20 as a real computer with infinite more possibilities than the game consoles that were fashionable at the time. But eventually buyers ended up playing games on their VIC-20 anyway...

The C=64 launch campaign focused exclusively on the spectacular memory/price equation when compared with its competitors. Although this was a strong argument, the real strength of the campaign was that it didn't mention the other spectacular features (like the mostly undocumented advanced sound & graphic features). This unintentional underpromise/overdeliver strategy led C=64 users into spreading a buzz about all the unmentioned features of their computer. So eventually like Apple, Commodore also ended up with a enourmous pool of consumer evangelist, although unintentionally.

And finally the launch commercial of the Amiga 500 in the US, actually the last major campaign Commodore ran before setting in their final nose dive. Like Apple, Commodore pioneered the concept of the "creative computer" (2 years earlier they had demonstrated the original Amiga on a trade show with Andy Warhol) albeit in a less inspiring way than Apple did at that time.