[Coco] Another Radio Shack Article

Arthur Flexser flexser at fiu.edu
Sat Jan 4 17:59:41 EST 2014


Elaborating on my earlier comments, I think Tandy's key error with the
CoCo in the early days was that they didn't seem to have any
conception that there was a strong HOBBYIST market tied to personal
computers.  To their way of thinking, or so it seems from their
marketing strategies, a personal computer could be either something
you used in business, or an educational and game-playing device for
children, and they chose to design and market the CoCo to fill the
latter niche.  This is a really strange sort of myopia for a
corporation that was renowned for catering to the electronics hobbyist
market in the amateur radio sphere.  If there was an awareness of the
hobbyist market at Tandy in those early days, those who possessed the
awareness seem to have lost out to marketing types who seemed to live
in rabid fear that somewhere, somebody who had a serious use for a
computer might buy a CoCo instead of a more expensive Tandy model.

Art



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