[Coco] Another Radio Shack Article

[Greg Law]

There was a niche within Tandy/Radio Shack that realized this and pushed for 
some of the hobbyist products to be included in the catalog and on store 
shelves for the Color Computer. I'm specifically referring to OS-9 and other 
Microware products that never would have been included in the Radio Shack 
catalog if this niche hadn't existed. Even so, OS-9 remained more of a niche 
product because of Tandy/Radio Shack's marketing strategy. I have no idea 
what could have happened if Tandy/Radio Shack had introduced a more 
"hobbyist friendly" version of the Color Computer (say a version with the 
disk drives and expansion bus in one case like the Model III and IV), but I 
have no doubt that such a computer would have bitten into Model III, IV, and 
16 sales. In fact, I wonder if such a computer running OS-9 Level 2 would 
have obsoleted the 16 running Xenix.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Arthur Flexser
Sent: Saturday, January 04, 2014 5:59 PM
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [Coco] Another Radio Shack Article

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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