Agreed! In the 68k Mac's lifetime, you could emulate a Mac on an Amiga in realtime (in software alone with ShapeShifter, or add hardware support with A-Max II) and run most of its software, as that software was OS-bound and never touched hardware directly, whereas most AmigaOS software touched Amiga hardware, so never the other way around.

There's also different audiences. If you had an Amiga because it had cool, arcade quality games for the time... you'd be looking for more cool games in future. So you'd *probably look to the SNES and Megadrive, and then the Playstation. Hence you'd switch to them rather than stick with the Amiga.

Whereas, if you were a business, you're looking for the software you bought to keep working. If you were in publishing, you had Quark Express on Macs. If you were in music production, you had Cubase on Atari STs, Sibeleus on Acorns (though in the case of both of those, there was pressure on the software vendors to make an Intel/Windows version too). If you were is business, you had Word and Excel on IBM PCs and compatibles. Hence why you'd stick with that line of computers.

The Amiga never really had much of a "professional" following, even though its multimedia software opened up a lot of amateur creativity. There were only really things like the Video Toaster in the USA, and even that obscured that it was actually an Amiga.

That said... even the Mac was not certain to survive. In the 1990s, Apple suffered from a lot of clone Macs taking away their market share; ultimately what saved them was Microsoft being forced to keep them on life support (keep producing Office for Mac), and ultimately Steve Jobs return and bringing NeXT with him, which turned into Mac OS X and the iMac and renewed relevance.

I ran an A-Max mac emulator on my 030 accelerated Amiga 2000. It worked surprisingly well!

> ultimately what saved them was Microsoft

Indeed. At the time of MSFTs surprise investment of $150M in Apple (supposedly arranged in a single phone call from Steve to Bill), more than one pundit opined that the Justice Department's anti-trust investigation into Microsoft was a major factor. I don't recall the exact timing of the suit being filed vs the investment but MSFT certainly knew well in advance that a suit was likely as the Justice Department investigated for years before filing. A key part of MSFT's anti-trust defense was that there were viable competitors, of which Apple was the best example. At the time of the investment Apple was, arguably, just months away from running out of cash. Jobs needed the money to buy time so he could rework the marketing and products.

I've always thought that investment was a smartly pragmatic move by Gates. It was a relatively cheap way to ensure he still had one competitor on life support that wasn't quite dead yet - and, although I'm sure Gates didn't expect it, MSFT actually ended up making money on the investment (although Gates would have happily given up that profit to not have the iPod->iPhone->iPad to compete with later :-) ).