Michael:
Actually, there was a blurring of responsibilities between the U.S. and Japanese contributions, and we functioned truly as a multinational team, with contributions from both sides adding to product design, ergonomics, software and other features. For example, the VIC chip which created revolutionary sound effects including voice synthesis and music, was developed at MOS Technologies in Valley Forge. Much of the design work drawn from a different computer, a color version of the PET/CBM [*2], was drawn from Santa Clara, CA. And a good deal of software design came from Yoshi [*3] and his small team in Japan. The ergonomic decisions were mostly mine although I made sure to involve Jack Tramiel in these decisions. Jack had final approval but left most of the key decisions to me - (name of the computer, type of keyboard, color of keys and case, decision to add function keys, built-in RS-232 and some other ergonomics).
 

Michael:
This decision was made by Tony Tokai [*4] in Japan and I had no involvement with the name of the Japanese product. So whether this name was friendly or not rests with Tony who is Japanese. I should mention that I did visit Japan and saw the NEC computer which I thought was a terrific computer and major threat. After seeing the beautiful function keys on the NEC computer, I insisted on function keys on the VIC-20 [*5]. I believe that if the NEC was launched in the U.S. with some major marketing push, that computer could have carved a niche in the market, but when we used my "bear in the woods" strategy - NEC never came in with their excellent product. The bear in the woods strategy goes like this: what do you do when you're being chased by a bear in the woods? Answer: you throw down your knapsack. The bear stops to examine it, and you run like crazy, or scurry up a tree. So what do you do when you're an American product manager and the Japanese are breathing down your neck? Throw them a low-cost, user-friendly computer (the VIC-20) - when they stop to examine it (which at that time took them 6 to 12 months!), you work like crazy to make an even better computer (the Commodore 64). Keeping the Japanese competition at bay was a major strategic goal of mine at Commodore, since I had lived in Asia for 2 years and knew the danger of a major Japanese push in home computing. Our tactical moves in price/performance kept them out of the market during the time that I was involved at Commodore. I should add that the Japanese were EXCELLENT technical allies as well as competitors and we greatly valued the contributions and candor with which companies like Sony et. al. shared their innovations, and previewed what was coming. I remember seeing an active matrix cell half a decade before it was used in laptops - but when I saw it, the cost was $125 per cell!
 

Michael:
I believe Jelly Monsters (a replication of Pacman [*6]) was also programmed in Japan. As I recall, there were very few if any groups in the world capable of programming cartridge based video games [*7].

The Atari games were pitifully crude. The best games in the world were on video consoles found in arcades, bars, etc. Nintendo was a major player, along with Bally-Midway. At one point, I negotiated a contract with Nintendo for all of their games to be ported to Commodore computers, and got them pretty excited about the prospect of being on home-based machines. At the last minute - when the contract was ready to be SIGNED - Jack without warning told me he was canceling the deal I negotiated. I was extremely humiliated by that, and lost face as a result. I believe that my efforts to evangelize home computing to Nintendo had a direct impact on their decision to go into the game console market [*8], because they weren't really thinking about that before I approached them with our licensing deal. I have always regretted Jack's decision because I desperately wanted Donkey Kong and other games on our machines. I believe that Jack decided to snub Nintendo because we had an agreement in place with Bally-Midway.
 

Michael:
I have a MAX machine at home. It was a small black machine that was going to revolutionize the home computing field. I had identified the four basic killer apps for home computing: word-processing, spreadsheets, database management, and graphics. All four apps were built into the HARDWARE of the MAX, along with a terrific 256 word speaking vocabulary (I researched and selected the words myself). We also planned to fix any bugs and provide software updates on a plug-in cartridge, a very elegant way to do upgrades that addressed the problem of having the software apps on chips in the motherboard.
 

Michael:
The MAX machine I describe was a prototype that was actually product engineered and built by Commodore as a next generation computer. We were growing very impatient with the poor and slow support from software vendors, so we decided to license some of the best software around the simply include it with the machine. The vendors were happy because they would be in every machine, and were prepared to license their software at an affordable rate, as a result. This allowed us to include a word processor, spreadsheet, database and graphics package - the four primary "killer apps" that were driving home computer uses at the time.

The MAX was a small sleek black computer with grey keys and red highlights. It had a built in vocabulary of 256 words and could be programmed to speak. It was also compatible with the low-cost modems that we pioneered (actually the first $100 direct connect modem on a cartridge was my idea and I contracted with a small engineering firm to do the work since our engineers were overloaded at the time). Anyway, this was an innovation we perceived as a "next generation" home computer that would expose first time users to some of the real "power" of computing - and we figured they would find their own individual uses for the database and spreadsheet features. We were also going to provide software programs to go with the spreadsheet, database, etc. - templates - for such things as mortgage calculations, some rudimentary accounting and so on.

Unfortunately, Jack was voted off the board the season we were supposed to launch this product, and the leadership left in place - mostly men from outside the computer industry, mostly in their 50s and 60s - had a penchant for getting back into the business computer market, where they thought the price margins would be higher. That shift in strategy from home and personal computers to business computers - including the development of PC clones sold in Europe - was the beginning of the end for Commodore, and it began with the cancellation of the MAX. This machine - although taken to final design - and as I've indicated, I still have one at home - was killed by the incoming management team that took over when Jack Tramiel left the company.

 

Michael:
The Plus/4 was salvaged from the MAX concept, but lacking the strong support of the product managers and technical staff who departed in 1984, it faltered in the marketplace.

As you can imagine, the six months following Jack Tramiel's departure were extremely frustrating for me and everyone else at the company, except the new "professional" management group who really messed up the company after we had become the world market leader in home and personal computing. I've never in my career seen such squandering of market power, or such disastrous strategic decision making. Frankly, I was always surprised that more people weren't sued by the shareholders.

Also, 6 months after Jack departed, about 35 of the top talent in the company all walked out in one fateful week, in May 1984 [*10]. Nearly all the top middle management and technical management team left the company in that single week (including me, the president of the U.S. company, many of the top engineers, etc.). The top management including Irving Gould the chairman, did nothing to stop anyone from leaving. They basically let all the "gurus and geniuses and wunderkind" of this remarkable company walk out the door. I think if they simply asked some people to stay, they would have, but basically they thought they could re-engineer the company into a "business" computer firm, which was a strategic disaster, as everyone knows from the crash in revenues, profits, and stock price.

I don't like to dwell on "soap opera" issues, but it's interesting to note that when so many people left, the company's management and legal staff harassed the departees and in several cases tried to prevent people from exercising legitimate stock options and even tried to prevent people from receiving their last pay check. At one point I had to write a personal note to Irving Gould in order to get my stock registered and last check paid (Irving took immediate action to help me, I should add). Anyway, this hostile attitude may explain why some hot new products like the real "MAX" were simply killed. Politically, the transition from Jack Tramiel and the team he built was extremely messy and inept, and what happened to the company subsequently reflects the result of all this turmoil.

What a mess that was. It left a bad taste all around. To sum up the "demise" of Commodore, after Jack Tramiel left, the creative core of the company was sucked out of the organization and only a shell remained. I was totally dismayed by the ineptitude displayed by the waves of management teams that came in, one after the other, to try to run the company, after Jack. Keep in mind, in 1984, we were the dominant home computer company in the entire world, and had vanquished such competitors as Texas Instruments, Atari and many others. All Commodore had to do was keep from committing suicide. Hmm. Well, there is always the potential for company's to go insane and melt down, I guess, and the Commodore saga certainly demonstrates this.
 

Michael:
First of all, names changed a lot at Commodore. Sometimes we introduced a model at a computer convention just to see the reaction, and only pursued it if there was high demand. We had such a terrific engineering team, that we could slap together (over 6 to 9 months) a commercial quality prototype, float it at a convention, and then decide whether to production engineer it, or not. For example, my original name for the VIC-20 was "Commodore Spirit" which I thought had a nice cache - however, at the last minute, my Japanese colleagues informed me that the word "spirit" in Japan does not mean "wonderful energy" or "Casper the friendly ghost" - but rather would be associated with horrid, ghastly, ghoulish things. So I went to my second choice, which was VIC, and since VIC sounded to me like a truck driver, I arbitrarily added the number 20, because 20 is a friendly number.

To address your specific question, I can only say that most of our international general managers had a terrific amount of autonomy to customize computers for their markets - it was one of our truly ingenious secrets - giving country-managers the freedom to adapt the core technologies to their home markets which they understood best. Anyway, I would assume that Tony Tokai in Japan saw the possibilities of the Max and gave it a shot in his market, because the U.S. management team had an entirely different focus.
 

Michael:
Actually, the Home Computer Wars was published in 1986. As I recall, a Japanese-American convinced a consortium of 12 Asian companies to adopt a common standard and produce a family of game machines and home computers all sharing the same standard and this would theoretically provide a huge amount of software, interchangeable on many machines. Developers could design one game that would fit 12 machines. The potential for 12 companies to come into the U.S. market, each with its own push and advertising budget, could have been a major competitive nightmare for Commodore, and I was very concerned about this when I first learned of the strategy. Then I looked more closely at what they were doing and realized these 12 companies had been tricked into adopting a two year old obsolete technology that produced blocky, slow, embarrassingly crude graphics that were really inferior. When I saw the first MSX machines at a trade show, I laughed all day long! I just walked around howling with laughter and whenever anyone mentioned MSX I exclaimed, "You mean MS-DEAD!" because I knew that awful technology would arrive still-born to the marketplace. I have no idea why the MSX consortium didn't conduct better due-diligence on this technology, except perhaps that the person who put together the strategy was a Japanese American and maybe they trusted him because of that. I can think of no other reason they would attempt to use that crude operating system. What a disaster [*11].