> The Amiga had a litany of custom chips to achieve its incredible performance.
Exactly, and with PC technology rapidly catching up, updating them to a level on par with the latest VGA and sound cards was an enormous effort that didn't kill Commodore (internal mismanagement did) but came too late to save them. First prototypes of the AAA chipset are mentioned and visible in the famous "Deathbed Vigil" video shot by Dave Haynie himself at the C= headquarters in West Chester PA when the company was already belly up. I would highly recommend watching it also to non ex Amiga users, also for interesting vintage technical content, but keep tissues ready in case you were.
When the Amiga launched in 1985 its hardware was unquestionably the state of the art in microcomputers. Macs didn't have color yet, and the best consumer PCs had 16-color EGA graphics and a beeper speaker (or 16-color Tandy graphics and 3-voice sound).
While Amiga stood still, IBM in 1987 introduced 256-color VGA, which the industry rapidly expanded to Super VGA with higher resolutions and more colors. By 1990, it was easy to buy a clone PC with Super VGA and sound card, both from a variety of third-party vendors and both exceeding Amiga's capabilities. While Amiga still had a theoretical advantage in terms of hardware sprites, in practice PC horsepower increased so quickly that its lack of same didn't matter.
To put another way, there is no way a single company with a relatively small customer base can compete against a gigantic ecosystem of many dozens of vendors, all battling to serve a customer base ten times as large by constantly lowering prices and improving capabilities.
You're more or less on point, but the conclusion doesn't follow the premise. It is not a good analogy.
When the original Amiga team left Commodore, they left a finished new chipset (Ranger), with very competitive specs.
However, Commodore discarded it as too expensive, not attributing any value to being first to market or having the best product.
Management systematically acted against the engineers, such as when they unilaterally decided not to have a DSP and forbid the engineers to use the A3000 prototype boards with DSP on them that they had made.
There's multiple books about the story of the Amiga and its mismanagement by Commodore, as it extends much further than that. Lots of cancelled projects, many of which finished like Ranger was.
