Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

From: silverdr_at_wfmh.org.pl
Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2019 20:25:15 +0100
Message-Id: <B7C73A22-EDD6-4BC6-AA64-99C446368A23@wfmh.org.pl>
> On 2019-01-08, at 19:30, Jim Brain <brain@jbrain.com> wrote:
> 
> I think we can all agree that IBM of the 1980s was a behemoth and did not move quickly.  I choose to think there were some bright engineers in IBM who loved the company and knew the company should be in the personal computer market before it slipped away from Big Blue's reach, and they compromised many things in order to bring out a product very quickly to the marketplace.  It was not pretty, it had significant shortcomings, but it grew into an industry and won over all of the more compelling designs in the Marketplace.  Those engineers knew something it has taken years for me to understand.  You can improve a crappy design using sales and revisions that drive sales, but you can't survive if your engineering masterpiece misses the market opportunity.  
> 
> The goal of the engineer, thus: make as few compromises as necessary in order to get into the market; sell enough product to allow a re-engineering effort to remove the compromises.

I fully agree with the above. The only thing I doubt is whether in this particular case it "won" because IBM sold so many units that it allowed to fuel further development or someone noticed how many units all the clone makers were selling and woke up to this market. IOW - was it a success of the compromised design that hit the market in the perfect time or was it the result of the management decision to release the "worthless" design to the world. We would have to know the exact details of what was happening at IBM to know for sure. And as I wrote more than once - I only have issue with extrapolating from the market success (of mostly other manufacturers than IBM itself I guess) back to the supposed brilliancy of engineering that went into the machine in question. The rest is history and I easily admit that it was better in the Darwinian sense, which is all that matters in the end.

-- 
SD! - https://e4aws.silverdr.com/
Received on 2019-01-08 21:00:08

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