The Commodore Amiga computer will always exemplify to me, being the "technically superior" product, and failing anyhow, because of terrible mismanagement. Commodore went belly up in 1994. The Amiga, was a beautiful machine, in all of the aspects that make a machine beautiful. It had a wonderful OS, with great support for preemptive multitasking (a rarity back then).
The Amiga was first the brain child of a small group of men. Jay Miner was one of the more influential, and basically saw the Amiga through to completion. It can be said, that it would have completely flopped altogether, had it not been for the wisdom, and foresight he put into it.
The Amiga was first released to the public in 1985. It did not take the world by storm, for a variety of reasons which can be argued until the end of time. It was a success when Commodore released the second generation models 500, and 2000. Both of these computers made use of a full rom, requiring no kick start disk.
The 2000, was an engineering marvel, with the Amiga Zorro II bus, and the PC ISA 16-bit bus. You could add in expansion cards, designed for the PC of the day, and if you had the A2088 Bridgeboard (A PC on a PCB), that plugged into both the Zorro II bus, and the ISA bus, you could use any software designed for the XT PC's of the day. This meant, for a price, that you could use both computers completely seperately from one another, and never experience any significant slowdown. The PC windows seemlessly integrated into the screen of the Amiga.
I can tell you from great experience, that on NO level did the PC have an edge on the Amiga, aside from a larger choice of software. For a time, there was a very large selection of 3rd party Amiga hardware, and software that created a reasonably lucrative market, that exists to this very day. An Amiga will still fetch a pretty good price, despite it's almost complete obsolesence. When the Amiga was released, there was no "Windows" per se (Windows prior to 3.0 just doesn't even count in my book). Few computers made use of graphics for productivity.
The PC elite of the time, scoffed that the Amiga was merely a game machine, never mind that virtually every feature of the Amiga was later adopted by the PC folks. Most of what makes Windows XP a good OS, IMHO is that it HAS game. If it didn't, I'd be using FreeBSD almost exclusively by now. Games are the ONLY serious reason left for not using FreeBSD or Linux or what have you. At this point, if you use Windows, it's by choice aside from games. Anyhow, the Amiga had a wonderful selection of "multimedia" software. The Amiga was particularly adept at broadcast video production.