From the 2002 [sic] article at Slate called, Why TiVo is destined to fail. - By Brendan I. Koerner:

The Amiga suffered from an identity crisis that the company never solved. Was it a gaming machine? People were happy enough with their Ataris.


This smells like it either wasn't written by someone alive on the early 80s, or, if he was, they didn't play video games. Though the 2600 certainly lasted a while, by the C=64's time, pretty much the whole crowd had moved on from the Atari, maybe several times -- Intellivision, Colecovision. When the C=64 was released, it was *the* game console to have, PC or no.

If being a game console helped make the C=64 what it was, why would being a game console hurt the Amiga? I think you've got to go places other than an identity crisis. Seems the Amiga wasn't exactly a great deal either... (though trust me, I'll remember playing Speedball on the Amiga for the first time in 1990. Lots of fun, and it looked great.)