[Coco]: Tandy's biggest mistakes thread

[Arthur Flexser]

I believe all of that falls under the heading of misguided marketing strategy.  
It seems to me that Tandy very deliberately set out to prevent the CoCo from
being taken as a "serious" machine, despite being well aware that this would cut
into CoCo sales and make it a less able competitor for Commodore, Atari, etc.  
Tandy's marketing folks wanted to sell more of their more pricey models, on
which profit margins were higher, and god forbid that any customers might buy a
CoCo if there was potential to sell them a more expensive machine.  They always
thought of the CoCo as filling the "Christmas toy for the kiddies" niche in
their computer line.  You can see that in their advertising.  That's why the
CoCo was given a lame 32-column text display, etc.  I think they calculatedly
sacrificed CoCo sales in the hopes of selling more of their higher-end (i.e.,
more expensive) models.

Art

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, John Guin wrote:

> 
> Hello all,
> 
> I simply wanted to spin off the thread for Tandy's biggest mistakes from the
> email thread about the Coco 4, and create a whole new thread for armchair
> quarterbacking (25-15 years after the fact, no less).
> 
> Anyhow, had I been running the Radio Shack show, here's what I would have
> done differently:
> 
> 1.  Third party software, books and magazines in Radio Shack.  This easily
> helped Commodore sell 10 million+ machines, and limited the color computer
> to <<<about 1.3 million, best estimate?  Anyone know?  I think I've asked
> this before...>>>
> This first point is easily #1 in my book, and these other items are FAR less
> important.
> 
> 2.  Support for lower case letters and more than 32 characters per line.
> This really limited the word processing capability, and made the machine
> compare poorly to the C64 and others (except the VIC, of course).  On the
> flip side, setting the default to 32 was a great idea so the early adopters
> who wanted to hook this thing up to an older TV could get a decent picture.
> 
> 3.  The weird 32K limit for BASIC.  I consider this the equivalent of the
> 640K limit on DOS, and there was really no reason for it.  You could
> "re-org" the ROMs around and get about 40K available for BASIC anyhow, so
> this should have been the default.  Again, the C64 powered up with ~39K
> free, and the COCO should have done the same.
> 
> 4.  Better keyboard from day one.  They finally fixed this with the Coco 2,
> but I don't understand why they didn't re-use the Model 1 keyboard or
> something similar.  
> 
> 5.  Over-reliance on the 6809 to do everything.  Fortunately, it could do a
> whole lot, but having it bogged down with sound, graphics (no sprites) and
> everything else seemed to "waste" that power on tasks that could have been
> done with a different chip.
> 
> 
> Anyway, thanks for letting me vent!
> 
> John
> 
> -- 
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>