Workshops

3. The fall of Commodore from my point of view - part 1 (by Rainer Benda)

Reader Ugo Paliotto points out that the first three parts of our now finished series "The fall of Commodore from my point of view" have not been published in AMIGA aktuell international yet. We're going to make good this oversight this month and in the month coming up:

»OK, where should I begin.......

I worked for Commodore from 1989 until 30 September 1993 in Frankfurt (under four managers: Peter Kaiser, Winfried Hoffmann, Helmut Jost and Alwin Stumpf - P.K. and W.H. not for long). I have some fond memories of the job, but I think that Commodore's demise might have been have been averted if management had listened to the advice of the employees. Nobody expects managers to have the technical knowledge to make decisions on their own - the company employs technical specialists for that. But if managers ignore the specialists they are heading for trouble. Every company has its problems but at Commodore there were simply too many.

I don't remember where Peter Kaiser came from or what he's doing now. In an IT magazine I recently saw a picture of him - if my memory is right then he's now managing a company. He was at Commodore for about six months. I don't remember if he didn't like his job or he was dismissed. Well, I believed that he was fired when I saw him leave the building.

Winfried Hoffmann went to ASI-Computer after his dismissal and as far as I remember he was one of the founders of this company. The headquarters of ASI-Computer were (are?) in Frankfurt Niederrad a few metres away from the Commodore building. He's now a manager at Fujitsu and he started some kind of joint-venture with Siemens. When he left some people from Commodore "followed" him.

Helmut Jost was employed at Commodore (once or twice!?) at the distribution unit and went to Amstrad in the middle 80s. He returned as manager to Commodore. He was accompanied by one of our technical directors (Roland Bernschein). He "introduced" the Commodore Volksmodem VM2400 which at the same time was the reason why he had to leave.

After his job at Commodore Helmut Jost (whose dream was to manage IBM) went to Compaq. I don't know what he's doing now.

Alwin Stumpf was also in the Commodore team in the early 80s but went to Atari and reappeared just in time for the "unofficial" transaction of Commodore. After he had left C= in 1993/94 he went east with his brother-in-law in order to develop some kind of PC multimedia hardware.

First of all: I do not agree with the common opinion that Commodore's fall was caused by Commodore's PC series only or that Commodore had to file for bankruptcy because of this series even if the press always presents it that way.

Commodore's fall was based on the arrogance of the leading managers who believed that Amigas could be sold without doing anything. You just had wait and people would queue up impatiently to buy the whole stock-in-trade, they thought. The Amiga wouldn't have changed this way of thinking even if they had sold a hundred times more machines because there were too many wrong decisions and the consequences were inescapable.

In the early and middle 80s Commodore had serviceable "IBM compatible" computers which were used in many schools. Models such as the PC10/PC20 sold quite well around 1985 (until then there was no Amiga and the main profit came from this series and the C64). Some returns also came from the C128 but not as much as expected. Commodore had several big customers such as the German railway stock corporation and this business was probably profitable.

Unfortunately some employees thought of their job as a "normal" job (loyalty is OK, but blind obedience and trust in God to get all decisions right is unhealthy). On the whole, the distribution employees thought that everything would turn out right somehow. Commodore had survived worse situations. Some didn't care at all because Commodore was just a stepping-stone in their career.

Without exaggerating I can say that there was nobody who dared to risk his neck but me in order to prevent or put off the evil day. In my opinion Amiga users were never regarded as such, but as simple customers... buy our box, bye bye.

Exceptions to this behavior were Peter Keshishian (at that time product manager Amiga) who left the company in 1992 after he had found out that his (and our) goals could not be achieved. Others included (even though he didn't like those kind of "fights") Doc Peter Kittel (leader documentation) and Wilfried Haering (some may remember his name from several Amiga OS books from Markt&Technik) who was product manager for Amiga-Unix (more on this later) and finally Imke Gisch (product manager for CDTV - many ideas, worked hard but all in vain, I'd say).

In Frankfurt at Commodore (when I was a member of the team) 5-6 people were responsible for the Amiga and the same number in Braunschweig. We ran the dealer hotline, customer hotline, product management and service (greetings to Axel Kraemer and Andreas Steep who are presently employed at Amiga International, Braunschweig, before at Amiga Technologies :-) ).

[note from the translator: Axel Kraemer left Amiga International in November 1999.]

The Amiga (I'm talking about me) was always an emotional thing and more than just a box that you did your work on. Thus it was even more painful that nobody seemed to listen to ideas. You simply could not get it off your mind even when you tried to concentrate on more "important" things. Memories keep flooding back.

Commodore Germany (that was basically no more than a name for us employees) had a special division called "ESCO" (European Support and Coordination Office) for contacting Commodore USA in times of trouble. We would tell hem our problems and if they understood (I'm not talking about the language here) and the managers in the USA thought that they were serious then something would be done (not enough, unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, but I don't blame the American colleagues - one of them today is employed at Amiga Inc. and bears the name Dr. Allan Havemose although I think that he's too conservative. Maybe he simply wasn't allowed to do more. Before the end of Commodore he went back to the USA). We were able to contact Commodore in the USA directly as well (Dave Haynie, Carolyn Scheppner ...) but I didn't get this chance very often. ESCO supported the German part of Commodore with additional information on new products (plans of boards, beta software ...)

The hierarchy at Commodore worked this way: we had to report everything to our technical director (at first there was one for the Amiga division and one for the PC division) and he then passed everything to the managers - filtered or not.

It was always difficult to get action on problems because, unfortunately, the directors responsible were often changed (I experienced that four or five times). Later there was one director for both the Amiga and the PC division.

One of the technical directors wanted to close the Amiga division because he saw no use in the Amiga. Shortly after he had said that he was moved on... Then there was another who understood our problems but he couldn't get a response from management and so we had to send in the same reports again and again.

The last director thought that he was experienced enough to tell the management in his own words what we had given him as written text. Of course, something completely different came out. In addition, Commodore hadn't really thought through our division properly. We were supposed to help people with Amiga problems but (as the management said) we cost too much money. We would have liked to offer further services or products but we were not allowed to because we were not a distribution division. Sometimes we were called "technical support division", then simply "Amiga division" and later on "technical marketing" and so on... (I often had the feeling that creating calling card titles had highest priority).

Unfortunately, this meant that the product managers couldn't do what their title said. There was nothing to manage and they were not allowed to introduce products either (the management at that time did it with/without consent of Commodore USA). As long as a manager made profit he could do whatever he wanted. If there was no profit then he was dismissed (with a money bonus, of course). Whoever made most profit was allowed to set the company's direction. The managers of other branches (Austria, Italy, etc.) basically had no right to decide anything. Some of them were probably seething about that...

to be continued...