in the end 3 model styles, (with 32 bit chipsets and CD)
1. A1200 style with at least 1 fastram slot and blitter slot
2. CDTV style much the same as above
3. 3000/4000/Tower style with the usual type of stuff expected
of a highend machine cpu slot, zorro ect.

I wonder where the amiga could have been with the above even if CBM
still failed.
Im mean If you had a good base model with CPU, buses, memory and sound at a fairly good level and the blitter on a card, 3rd party developers could have maybe developed newer blitter cards of thier own design following the same register pattern but adding new features. Would it not have ended up a sort of graphics card like todays riding on the wave of the PC cards of that time 3dfx ect

There was a Mac emulator for the Amiga and ST, but it required original Mac ROMS. Funny enough, Mac applications worked faster on Amiga and ST hardware than on the original Mac..
The thing is that all 3 companies were frantically trying to protect their customer base (tied to their own specific hardware) and weren't keen on co-operation at all - let alone licence their OS's.

The Amiga chipset was indeed difficult to evolve further, but not
impossible. Actually the engineers at Commodore built a much more expandable and modular approach in the AAA-chipset -which was cancelled in 1993 BTW.
In a broader perspective, the Amiga was scalable in every possible way. Just look at accellerators with fastRAM and Retargetable Graphics cards. It was a shame that all this advanced hardware -mostly coming from 3rd party vendors- never could become a commodity in the Amiga world because commodore chose not to evolve the A500 and A2000.
Simply replacing the aging 68000 with a faster clocked CPU with some fastRAM in the A500plus for example would allready have made a world of difference.

Yes, that's precisely the reason why buying a new Amiga was mostly useless if you already had one. Commodore did not earn anything from an Amiga once it was sold. Since the base configuration remained the same for so long, each Amiga customer meant a lost future customer. However, this person would have been the most likely to buy an upgraded future machine if it had meant any advantage over the older machine. Thus, it is my firm believe that Commodore's main mistake was to not continuously upgrade the minimum CPU and the custom chips (as well as making additional stuff compulsory components like hdds and fastmem). They probably thought they could sell the same piece of hardware for so long because it did work with the C=64. With the Amiga it meant always shrinking margins which ultimately led to bankruptcy.

Commodore did not compete speed wise with the chip makers and they really didn't develop a new SID chip to compete with the old chip.

Some of the problems were perception.  I would walk into an Amiga store that sold PCs and they would tell me that everyone was buying PCs and I shouldn't waste my time with Amiga.  They said there were 10,000 more programs that worked on the PC.

A problem was they kept selling the C-64 with a 40 column screen.  They should have upgraded the display so that it wasn't considered a toy.  The other problem was the keyboard was not fun for typing and the other problem was Commodore engineers referred to the C-64 as a toy.  They also should have upgraded the internal memory on the C-64 instead of selling it with ram expanders.  They should have stopped depending on Microsoft for Basic and did more development in house.

I had a 1080 Amiga monitor.  They had made lots of monitors that stores stocked but few of them had "s" for stereo.  The problem was trying to get a 1080S monitor when they only had 1080D.  The other problem was trying to get third party disk drives because stores were having a shortage.

Commodore didn't do anything or enough of anything to get it into schools.  People bought Apple because their students only knew Apple II from school.

The problem was competition.  Commodore lost Jack Tramiel and he had enough power to restart Atari so Jack could have saved Amiga with all of that power and Amiga would have been better off without the competition from Atari.

I think the problem was gouging customers and not giving them enough computer.  The C-16 should have had more memory and not less and they were fighting a competitor which didn't exist nor did Commodore have the will to fight.

So you're going to have these posts on bulletin board for years to come.  The point is that users shouldn't live in the past but invest in developing technologies like the Minimig and Natami.

There are microcontrollers like the beaglebone and gameduino which could easily be developed into a computer.  The Maximite is a computer that exists and it runs on a Microchip pic.

The point is you can take old school Commodore values and put them into new technology and develop new computers.  Are you willing?

Don't tell me that. I was too poor to get good hardware. My first own computer was a C=16 with datasette when it was sold off at Aldi for 149 DM. That was 1986 and everybody around me had C=64s with 1541s. When everybody got A500s in 1989, I eventually had saved enough to get a C=64. Again with datasette. Thinking that it was more expensive to produce than an A500 seems a crazy thought.

I only got an Amiga when the A600 was sold off for 299 DM (which was half the price of the C=64/datasette combo four or five years earlier). The only computer-related thing my parents ever got me was a monitor to stop me from occupying the (black-and-white) family TV. When I eventually earned some money myself (and my A600 died on me), I got a used A1200 and everything you could stuff in it at the time: 50 MHz 68030, 50 MHz 68882, 8 MB fastmem, HD floppy, 330 MB 2.5" hdd. It cost me 2100 DM altogether. Now THAT was some piece of hardware! A very short time after that Commodore went belly-up...

It seems to me that they followed a "minimal investment" strategy by releasing only small, cheap expansions of the machines they had, and lost track with the much faster going PC market. Part of this problem was an "image problem" that the Amiga was a "games machine" and not suitable for "professional business". Neither of this was exactly true, but it was how it was received.

I disagree. When the A500 came out, every rich kid got one. And all of them got a PC for three or four times the price of the A500 four years later. Ironically, the higher price was what made parents believe that the PC was a serious thing while the Amiga was only a toy. My personal CEO-strategy pinned out above not only relied on making more powerful hardware earlier, it was also based on keeping the desktop line competitive in comparison to PCs by making them more powerful than the keyboard models and by producing quality office software inhouse. This would have avoided the "Amiga = toy" perception.

Thomas Richter wrote:

It seems to me that they followed a "minimal investment" strategy by releasing only small, cheap expansions of the machines they had, and lost track with the much faster going PC market.

So now you are saying the same thing? No upgrades to the hardware in a long time? :)

This. So true.

That may be a case by case, but at that time with my A4000 the feasible was reached in Amiga terms.

In retrospect, my later investments in PPC & Co. does not paid off, because the extension was too late/expensive and thus too little spread.

Yeah sure, i was only disappointed by the then Development and the hesitant attitude of the Commodore management and development department.