Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there). Atari really didn't get systems software, either, and never hired to the extent needed to make a good impact there. The world was basically safe from Atari being anything other than a low-end consumer computer company.
And the thing that probably saved Apple in the late 80s was the desktop publishing business.
Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there).
I know that is the conventional story (and pretty similar for the Amiga). I'm not convinced.
I think that both the Amiga & the Atari ST were too far ahead of their time. They were multimedia workstations, without anywhere to play that multimedia (except on other Ataris and Amigas).
Like you said, the Mac managed to hit the desktop publishing wave, which was exactly right for the the paper-centric late 80's and early 90's.
I worked on the OS for the Atari ST. It sure wasn't ahead of its time. We looked at the Mac and felt jealous; that was some real engineering, while we had a bunch of crap from Digital Research (and a lot of it was unadulterated junk).
I never used things like MiNT, but those weren't supported by Atari anyway.
Atari just didn't have the resources to sink into an OS that could compete. They knew how to make cheap hardware, but after a while the PC ate their lunch. Nobody wanted to do biz with the Tramiels, so games were pretty much off the table.
Yeah, the Amiga seems like it completely dominated the multimedia niche, but the multimedia niche of the time essentially consisted of the demoscene. Which was great, except that the demoscene was not that large.
Huh, Amiga (1000 onwards) was big in video. Especially smaller TV stations that couldn't afford SGIs. Amiga (and SGIs) were light years ahead of Macs in graphics. People often forget this fact.
My earliest forays into CG were on amiga and earliest paid jobs were with video toaster / lightwave and softimage on SGIs. Great times. With tools we have today they seem so primitive in comparison.
> And the thing that probably saved Apple in the late 80s was the desktop publishing business.
...and education, and government, and academia. Apple was a pretty safe bet in the 80s (The Mac IIfx was designed to government specs and was the fastest desktop PC around). They only really started to lose market after Windows 95.
And the thing that probably saved Apple in the late 80s was the desktop publishing business.