I dunno, Tramiel's Atari Corp kept the 8-bit line going for years after the changeover, adding new models. And they even had relative success later in places like Poland.

One problem is that these kinds of architectures that relied on special custom chips have inevitable obsolescence built in. When your "API" for graphics programming is a custom chipset at a certain clock rate with certain capabilities, it's just not going to scale up past a certain point. You get initial superpowers, but then Moore's law just makes it pointless.

See also: Amiga.

Tramiel arguably mismanaged Atari worse than Warner brothers. Sure Tramiel cared about computers, but his management style was hostile to getting anything done.

I agree that the custom chips were a dead end. However the ST line could have beat the mac if management was any good. (as could/should the Amiga, though I was Atari locked at the time and so I didn't pay attention to what they were doing)