[Coco]: Tandy's biggest mistakes thread

[jdaggett at gate.net]

Arthur

I would not call it misguided. Short sighted as to the potentials that a 
Coco line could be is more likely. 

Tandy intended the Coco originally as a game computer and a entry 
learning level computer. Just look at the manuals that were written 
and came with the Coco. They were written most likely at a 6th 
grade level of  understanding. The Coco was never intended to be a 
competior to the IMB clones and the Comodores and Amigas. 

Tandy had this product targeted and it stayed that way until the 
Coco 3. That is where the Coco started to break out some what 
from a simple low cost game and learning computer. By then it 
really was too little and too late. By 1986 Tandy had lost huge 
market share on the IBM clones. The Tandy 1000 line of computers 
had a hands off in the cons umer market because Tandy like 
Compaq had proprietary hardware. You could not take a harddrive  
from a IBM clone and put it in a Tandy 1000RL. 

If Tandy made a huge stu pid move was in making the internals of 
their 1000 line of computers with too much proprietary hardware. 
Alaso a dumb mistake was to place DOS  in ROM and you had to 
take th ecomp uter back to the service center to upgrade DOS.

james




On 20 Apr 2005 at 0:00, Arthur Flexser wrote:

Date sent:      	Wed, 20 Apr 2005 00:00:58 -0400 (EDT)
From:           	Arthur Flexser <flexser at fiu.edu>
To:             	CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts 
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Subject:        	Re: [Coco]:  Tandy's biggest mistakes thread
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> 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.