Irving saved Commodore several times, but he had no idea about computers and never used one. This also led to issues of understanding with CEO's, like Jack Tramiel. He left Commodore and went to Atari... and in a revenge move, worked on the Atari ST. While Jack didn't have deep knowledge on computers itself, he knew what businesses wanted and had an acumen for driving it, and especially on the idea of cost. This you can clearly see in how the ST got positioned; it was more of a business machine. The Amiga was more of a funtainment machine that was good at everything. This made it challenging to target a certain audience. It was great at video, music, and even did games, with a floppy drive, and a full-size keyboard, etc. MArketing had a difficult time to properly advertise it. Several CEOs followed, and Thomas Rattigan made the company profitable again, but drama followed very soon ... and only got worse with Ali; https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/mehdi-ali-the-end...
The best part of the whole "Jack Tramiel leaves Commodore, buys Atari" story is the part about Atari floating debt to Amiga. The debt was coming due around the time Tramiel bought Atari and, at the last minute, Commodore acquired Amiga and Atari was paid-off. There was litigation following-- Tramiel was never one to let something go quietly-- but in the end we got the Commodore Amiga.
In some alternate universe there were Atari Amigas and likely no Atari ST.
My understanding is that Commodore had a Z8000 machine in development. It would have been neat to see what they came up with, in light of the fact that Shiraz Shivji went to Tramel Tech / Atari. All silly speculation, but it is so neat that, effectively, two major players in a market “swapped” their engineering staff. Surely that’s an odd scenario.
