Be Excellent To Each Other

Christ. I thought he was dead then.

Saw it earlier on the BBC website but didn't post it. It's been part of the plan since the Sky buyout. Was always going to happen, the only question was when.

Naming fail.

Remind me how he became incredibly rich and famous again?

Viglen was an established company when he purchased it, all the others he set up himself.

Basically he purchased Viglen as he knew the computer market but the Amstrad name was shot to pieces after all the fiascos with their PC's (the faulty hard disk controllers, the dodgy version of MS-DOS, etc) none of which was their fault but damaged the brand totally.

Amstrad. The big break was the CPC, then the PCW and then the PC1512 and 1640. At one point in the 80's Amstrad were pretty much selling more computers than everyone else put together. They were enormously profitable as well. Think the profits were in the region of £250 million in 1988.

Of course the daft fools should have invested in a proper replacement for the Speccy and CPC instead of ploughing their money into PC's because they saw them as the future. They were right, but it didn't happen as quickly as they thought it would.

Of course I remember the CPC. But I always thought they were radically outsold by almost everything else, on the basis that they weren't terribly good*!



I did see a variety of their consumer electronics, I guess they won in the race to the bottom, quality wise. Must have had some clever people working for him though.


* In the opinion of a C64 owning teenager

This is all so he can be London Mayor next time the election comes up.

Do you know, I think you might be right about that.
We shall see.

But hang on a moment. It's exactly a year since he sold Amstrad to Sky. I'm more inclined to believe the deal was done that way for a smooth transition.

+ Amstrad isn't the huge business it once was. It's pretty much now doing what it did in the 70's. His other businesses are where the real money is.

Don't Amstrad basically just make set-top boxes now?

I'm sure chinny is right - sold a business, stayed on for the transition period and then toddled off to do other stuff. Sounds fairly normal to me. Although part of me really hopes the new CEO called him into a fake boardroom and fired him, Apprentice style.

A) - Amstrads computers were generally better built than their competitors. While Sinclair were suffering high return rates due to them using a dodgy factory in Scotland, Amstrad used state of the art facilities in Korea. So for their computers at least, they were not aiming at the bottom of the market.

B) - The Speccy and C64 did outsell the CPC, but the CPC still shifted 3 million units and at a far higher profit margin thanks to the higher retail price. Also it was the market leader in France where it sold a third of all units.

C) - The PCW and PC1512/1640 sold in large numbers and were very profitable.

D) The acquisition of Sinclair enabled them to further dominate the market. Walk into a branch of Dixons in 1987 and the chances were the only non Amstrad home computer on the shelves was the C64.

Pretty much. Amstrad have always had a contract to make them as a "thank you" from Rupert Murdoch. Without Alan Sugar's help Sky would have never launched as nobody else was interested in designing and selling the first Sky receivers. Murdoch never forgot that so Amstrad were always first out of the hat when it came to the contracts to make the boxes.