If you want to talk about exactly what triggered the entering in Bankruptcy, it was the injunction caused by the XOR patent preventing the CD32 from shipping. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32) Commodore stupidly went "all in" on the console market, no one knows if it would have been another Pippin, Dreamcast, etc failure. But it is not ridiculous, Commodore had moved manufacturing to the Phillipines and if there was no injunction, it is likely CD32 shipments (demand exceeded supply) would have repaid the short term debt they racked up allowing the company to continue as a going concern.

You may argue they would have been doomed eventually, but remember, Apple itself was almost bankrupt at one point.

Also, you claim about operating profits is false. One Google search was all it took to debunk, http://articles.philly.com/1989-02-01/business/26154229_1_ir... in 1989, EPS was $1.2 and the Amiga was selling well.

AmigaDOS was awful? Compared to what? The MacOS at the time was extremely primitive and ugly. Amiga had a real shell, it had ARexx, vastly superior to AppleScript, it had the equivalent of FUSE filesystems for tons of stuff, compression, networking (DNet), I regularly multitasked between my terminal/dialup and my programming environment. "Workbench", the drag-and-drop "Finder" equivalent was ugly and shitty, but Amiga users didn't use it for much anyway.

Yes, the Amiga was not a good "office" computer, it was a home computer, and in that regard, for the market it was targeting -- grown up 8-bitters, it blew away the Mac hard. I had a MacSE, it sat in a closet and in fact, running a MacOS emulator on my Amiga was a better experience than running the real Mac, and I only ran the Mac when I needed to run something required for college that was not available for the Amiga, and that was rare.

Nobody I knew in my age range when the Amiga came out gave a hoot about Word Perfect or Excel. The Amiga had perfectly usable, "Google Docs"-like simple word processors that were perfectly fine for most work. I did a lot of my college work with an awesome text editor and LaTeX on the Amiga.

There is nothing the Mac really had over the Amiga in it's day, except for AppleTalk, and some high end DTP software, at huge expense. For the home user, especially the creative person interested in art, music, or coding, the Amiga was far better. Compare MacPaint vs DigiPaint for example.

Commodore lost their lead by the time the MacII color and PC SVGA rolled out, because they did not put priority into new custom chipsets until it was too late. AGA/AAA arrived way after it had been surpassed by commodity SVGA cards, and the radical designs Dave Hayne/Jay Miner and others were working on for next-generation 3D graphics chips for the Amiga never got the resources.

Ultimately, they failed by mismanagement, but the fact that it took the industry 5-7 years to catch up with Amiga Hardware is a testament to how far ahead, how much of a step-function change, the Amiga was. It was the iPhone of 1985 IMHO, but too much ahead of it's time.

(BTW, the flickering issue in hires for people who needed it, was fixed by Flicker Fixers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fixer)