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> I think when commodity PCs became wide spread Amstrad ran out of corners to cut to get an edge and became uncompetitive.

It was when Amstrad dropped their own OS in favour of DOS that they became just another commodity PC maker. Actually first Amstrad moved to DR-DOS then MS-DOS to avoid potential compatability issues. Which I'm sure Microsoft would have eventually discovered.

http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011207/PX_9...

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I think that Amstrad's best selling line was actually the WPC range that used CP/M (8 million vs 3 million for CPC line with their own OS).

So having their own OS wasn't the deciding factor. I think it's the more commodity nature of PC hardware even compared to CP/M machines that did for them IMHO.

PCW range.

Doh! Yes, sorry PCW. Having a dyslexic moment there.

Ah yes. DR-DOS it was. So long ago, completely forgot about it.

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