Tell us, why do you think Commodore failed?
Hoooooo boy... take this with a grain of salt, but here's how I see things based on my incomplete knowledge of the history. I need to do more research on this front, read a few of the books from folks who were there, but here goes nothing:
So, during the calculator wars of the early/mid 1970s, Texas Instruments was knocking competitors out of the game left and right by charging through the nose for the chips they sold. Commodore was one of their customers, and was nearly put out of business as a result. Jack Tramiel's solution was to buy MOS Technologies, effectively putting an end to CBM's reliance on TI's semiconductors because they could suddenly produce their own for much of their big ticket items.
Fast forward to 1981, and Commodore's VIC-20 is in a price war with Texas Instruments' TI-99/4A home computer. Jack kept lowering the price, and TI kept having to do the same to compete, so they were selling at a loss -- against a wildly popular home computer at the time. Jack, ever-vindictive in his motives (business is war, as he liked to say), cut the price of the VIC-20 at a CES show, which killed TI as a competitor in that segment in the market, but he did so at great cost to Commodore.
The way he cut the prices on the VIC also included peripherals, which the various vendors relied on to make their profits. They charged back those losses to Commodore. The result tipped the balance to diminish Jack's position in the company, and Irving Gould ousted him. Jack jumped ship with his sons and went to go work for Atari, selling the ST series machines, which would go on to compete with the Commodore Amiga series.
The problem was that Jack was the big force behind giving the company direction, especially when guiding advertising. The C64 sold itself, which was a blessing and a curse. It meant Commodore never really had to try all that hard to make good ads for it, so when they had to work harder to push later products, they kinda sucked at it. This really hurt the Amiga out of the gate, because nobody knew how to sell this golden child they just acquired, meaning it took many years to find its legs in the market.
Weird side projects continued to build up, and company focus was lost. Engineers churned out some amazing products, but without a guiding force at the top steering the company, and advertising dropping the ball in selling the powerful machines they were creating, the company was already in a slow death spiral. The IBM PC compatibles had already taken hold of much of the market, and were continuing to chip away at Commodore's market share, which wasn't helped by Jack himself fighting the company he founded on the side of Atari. The ST and the Amiga were fighting for the scraps left behind by IBM's juggernaut platform.
Commodore was a dead man walking from the moment Jack just had to get revenge on TI for trying to screw him out of the market in the 70s. It's just that nobody knew what the repercussions would be when he did that...
