Commodore made two of the best selling, and indeed the most advanced home computers in the world in the 1980's and early 90's.
However, an
interesting thing to note about Commodore
computers is that the offical name of the company was
Commodore Business Machines. They always
insisted on
marketing their
best selling computers primarily as
business machines and not as the
games machines that
consumers wanted.
No doubt, from their viewpoint, this was a
sensible thing to do; It gave the computers some credibility alongside the early
IBM PCs and allowed them to charge a little over the going rate for a home computer because, hey, it's not
only a games machine, you can use it for homework!
The touble was, they seemed to believe their own marketing men. Usually a bad move, that.
Sega and
Nintendo eventually started to release games consoles which offered better graphics and sometimes better games than the Amiga could offer. Kids, being kids, wanted to play the latest games, so most parents started buying their younger children a console with the intention of buying a "Real PC" when they were old enough to need it for homework.
Commodore responded by released the Amiga 1200 and 3000 series with much improved graphics and
CPU speeds, but by this time the price of the average
PC clone was falling and it's credibility as a games machine was growing.
By this late stage, even if Commodore had produced an Amiga to compete in performance terms with the PC they couldn't hope to compete in terms of retail price, as the PC Clone was an
open system, allowing builders to change to the cheapest supplier for component parts.
The moral of this story is probably: Know who your real customers are, and learn from your own mistakes!