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Did Irving Gould try to sink the company to get control?

Did Irving Gould try to sink Commodore to get control?
 
[Quote]
Gould suggested that Tramiel travel to Japan to learn why they were able to outcompete North Americans in their own local markets. It was during this trip that Tramiel saw the first digital calculators, and decided that the mechanical adding machine was a dead end.[9]
[EndQuote]
-Wikipedia

I was a child when calculators sold for $100 or more and then TI and the Japanese dumped calculators on the market for $10. Commodore was first called "Commodore Business Machines" and they were in the calculator market. They took a heavy hit because why would a consumer buy a $100 calculator when you could buy one for $10?

Whether or not Jack Tramiel got credit for the C-16, Commodore offered it with less memory (16K and 32K ROM) to save money on silicon.   The planning and direction took shape well before the C-16 came out for consumers and was delivered. Their strategy was to drop the price of the C-64.  Their strategy was a price war from the beginning.  When you drop prices, profit drops to run the company and you can't reinvest that money in research and development.
Our company has one goal and that is to get products out the door.  Why is that different in the history of Commodore?
 
 
Why was the SID chip team only given a month to design the SID chip and what happened to them after the first month?
What happened to the original MOS team?
Why didn't Commodore fix the hardware in the 1541 making it faster? (We know the answer from your video.)
What happened to the Commodore LCD prototype?  (We know the answer from this website.)
Why didn't Commodore invest in schools after the Commodore Pet?
Why were Ram expanders separate for the Commodore 64 and 128 instead of put in the computer?
Where was the Commodore hard drive? They never invested in one.
What happened to the Commodore light pen? It was never released.
What happened to the Commodore Midi keyboard? It was only released in the Netherlands.

 
The prestigious B128 wasn't sold and were mostly destroyed. They weren't licensed by the FCC.

Prices didn't come down until the Commodore 64 which was 1983.
 
 
I don't know of anyone who has a Commodore B128.
 
No one knows the B128 existed and I've only saw a few liquidated in esoteric catalog and they were highly expensive and unsupported:

[Quote]
Due to the popularity of the C64, the P series was cancelled in the United States before it could be officially released; however, a few dealers who received preproduction units sold them. As these computers had not received approval from the Federal Communications Commission, this caused legal problems for Commodore. The units were recalled and destroyed, but a very small number exist today, in private collections. At least one model, the P500, was commercially released in Europe but only sold in small numbers.

The most common of the B series was the low-profile B128[1] (called the CBM 610 in Europe), which had 128 kilobytes of RAM. The B128 did not sell well, and ultimately Commodore's inventory was liquidated by Protecto Enterprises ("We Love Our Customers"), a large Commodore mail order dealer based in Chicago, Illinois.[1] The Protecto ads for the B128 bundle, including a dual disk drive, monitor and printer, appeared in various computer magazines for several years. The terms of the liquidation deal did not allow Protecto to advertise the computer's manufacturer, so it was simply referred to as a "128k computer". The Commodore name plate was legible in the photo in several of the ads, however.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_B128
 
 
 

Edited by: Chuckt on 2013-01-01 00:10
Did Irving Gould try to get control of Commodore?

Irving Gould got control of the company and Jack Tramiel wasn't happy about it, Jack left and formed Atari. We know that much. A book isn't going to tell motives or things that are not discussed.  I saw Jack Tramiel interviews on why he left Commodore and he wouldn't say other than he wasn't happy which could mean anything.

Irving Gould was a partner and he invested $400,000. He later got control of the company.

If you wanted to steal a company, what would you do? You would run it into the ground so the owner couldn't pay his bills. A company that isn't doing good is worth less. Right? The value of a company goes down and you could get a billion dollar company for a steal.
Could this be figured out today?  Can anyone with hindsight see it?  These are just some questions that I hope other people can look at and answer.  Did Irving have a hand in it?
 

My understanding is that Mr.

My understanding is that Mr. Gould had ultimate control anyways as Chairman since there wouldn't have been  CBM without his money.  Mr. Tramiel was free to run the company from what I could tell and as attested by his reputation for marketing  and internal management styles.  I also believe that Jack Tramiel didn't believe that anyone should use the company as their own piggy bank so to speak, in short Jack paid for his own meals in the company cafeteria while Irving flew around in the Pet Jet.  I also believe that few people could have done what Tramiel did, whether you agree with how he did it or not, and Irving Gould would have known this also.  One of the "rumors" they tried on us was that now that we made 10 Billion we needed someone (different) to get us to 100 billion. (Might have been 1 and 10 billion, I forget which milestone we had just cleared.)  We didnt believe that rumor so they went on and tried another, we didnt believe it because few could have done what the boss had done and dominate the US home computer market so thouroughly.  Yes this is not what Apple wpould have you believe.

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