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This is an interesting "what if" story. What if they pushed on with CAOS, would it have been awesome or would the Amiga never have existed as a commercial product. We will never know.

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A lot of things went right just by pure chance in the beginning of Amiga’s history.

Sadly that luck reversed later.

Alas I suspect that no combination of business and technical decisions could have allowed Commodore to succeed long term. They never had the scale or product market fit to succeed in the 32 bit era. Apple barely made it.

Even so, good business decisions were very rare at Commodore post-Tramiel. The only CEO who seemed to have a functional head on his shoulders was Thomas Rattigan, and he got canned after a year as CEO because Irving Gould was jealous of him. That the company survived as long as it did under the direct rule of Gould and then Mehdi Ali was nothing short of miraculous.

I'm not sure Commodore would have made it to 2000 even under better leadership, but I'm absolutely certain were it not for Gould's cupidity and Ali's braindead decrees, the company probably wouldn't have sunk as hard and fast as it did.

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