So back in the day, Commodore flew me out to Frankfurt Germany to interview me for the role of CTO of Commodore[1]. We had a wide ranging discussion about the role and Commodore's strength as a brand, etc etc. I wanted to dig into the financials though because even then, I had a reasonably good understanding that corporations are organized around their core mission, they invest in that mission to the exclusion of things that are "not core."

As we got to discussing things, the structure of holding companies holding holding companies and subsidiaries in the Netherlands licensing technology out to other subsidiaries, it was obvious that Commodore invested most heavily in creating a corporate structure that was "perfectly legal" and could argue away any tax liability based on any level of income. The CEO at the time, Rattigan, was a finance guy (in my opinion) not a computer guy. He liked the C64/C128 "better" because they had better margins and less of a support burden than the Amiga did. (emphasis mine)

I left unconvinced they were ever going to be serious about building computers, very much in the consumer/toy mindset of maximum margin/maximum volume. I politely let them know I would not be interested in pursuing the discussions further.

[1] Fun fact, the guy that took the job lives about 1/4 mile from me and we're friends :-)

I don't support this version. For me much more looks like, Commodore/Atari tops were very afraid of being accused of having a monopoly on PC market, but they couldn't create some semi-competitor like AMD that years, and did not have good enough control, to make open source design like IBM PC.