Max Toy, embattled Commodore president

Last Updated on January 6, 2026 by Dave Farquhar

Commodore went through a revolving door of executives after Jack Tramiel resigned due to conflicts with Irving Gould. On October 6, 1987, it was Max Toy’s turn. On that day, Commodore hired him. And for a while, it seemed like Max Toy might be the one to turn the company around. In this blog post, we’ll explore what was different, and what wasn’t so different about him.

President but not CEO

Notably, Max Toy was not a CEO at Commodore. Officially, he was president and Chief Operating Officer. This is an unusual arrangement, but Commodore’s chairman, Irving Gould, didn’t run Commodore in the usual ways.

Max Toy was a startup and turnaround specialist, having worked at Compaq prior to its initial public offering, and later for Ashton-Tate, a software company known for dBASE, which was sold to Borland. Immediately prior to joining Commodore, he had worked at ITT Systems.

From an outside perspective, Max Toy’s run at Commodore was successful. In the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 1988, Commodore turned a profit, earning $28.6 million, or $1.75 a share, on revenues of $871 million. The “major operational turnaround” that Mehdi Ali claims credit for happened under Max Toy’s watch.

Following the pattern

Max Toy doesn’t talk a lot about his time at Commodore, but he is not completely silent about it. It’s not clear if he is still working today, but a decade ago, he was an advisor to CEOs. He has multiple LinkedIn profiles, which describe him as a specialist in corporate startups and turnarounds. That’s how he describes his time at Commodore. He describes it as a major operational turnaround, not terribly differently from Mehdi Ali.

But given that the turnaround happened during the time they overlapped, and there wasn’t a repeat performance, I am inclined to conclude the turnaround had more to do with Max Toy than with Ali.

Commodore changed presidents every 18 to 24 months, and Max Toy was no exception to that. If you were following Commodore in the 1980s, the news cycle seemed to repeat itself. Commodore would hire a young executive from another technology company and they would give an interview or two once they’d had a few months to get familiar with the company. Invariably, the interview would predict a bright future based on the large install base of the Commodore 64 and 128 and the promise of the Amiga.

And then, within 6-12 months of giving that interview, the president would resign, and not exactly voluntarily. Then the cycle repeated.

How Max Toy was different?

I just described every Commodore president between Marshall Smith and Mehdi Ali. Smith wasn’t a technology executive and Ali was promoted from within. But the description fits Thomas Rattigan, Max Toy, and Harold Copperman.

And yet, it seemed to me there was something different about Max Toy. Reading his interview with Micro Times in issue 40 from February 1988, I think I understand the difference.

The Micro Times interview introduced Max Toy by saying the author knew him from his time at ITT. And it introduced Toy by saying he asked for a favor. If the journalist ever saw him messing up, give him a call and tell him about it.

In the interview, he said one of the first things he did was to ask to see the customer complaint file. He said the key to turning a company around was finding out what the customers had to say.

The main complaint he found was about support, so he hired more support people.

Entering the PC market

He also said that its customers were extremely loyal, more loyal than he was used to. He had a way to cash in on that loyalty too. At the time, Commodore was considering entering the PC market. One of the things he asked was if Commodore customers would consider buying a PC from Commodore rather than someone else. They said yes, which surprised him.

Commodore’s customers were handing them a short-term opportunity, so it’s easy to understand why he wanted to take advantage of that.

Children as the future of the company

The other thing he recognized was that a huge portion of his user base were still kids. Toy told a story about calling someone who had written Commodore a letter, and realizing a few minutes into the conversation that he was talking with someone who was about 12 years old. He saw this as a long-term opportunity, that these kids who were using Commodore computers would buy Commodore computers as adults.

The problem with this opportunity was Gould wanted results in 12 months, which was too soon to cash in on this particular attribute.

Understanding of the company’s product

Toy also seemed to have an above average understanding of the product. He could describe the advantages of their vertical integration, controlling the silicon production, controlling the hardware, design, and controlling the operating system. 32-bit operating system with preemptive multitasking in 1988.

He said that people who bought a PC ran one or two applications on them versus five or six applications if they bought an Amiga. He also knew Commodore had sold 600,000 Amigas and Apple had only recently sold its millionth Macintosh. That meant both companies were selling about the same number of units per quarter at that point. The Amiga’s best years were still ahead of it in 1988-89, when Toy was at Commodore.

He said he had been working his whole career to become president of a company.

That wasn’t exactly new. But it seemed like this time, Commodore had found someone who was ready for the difficult task of turning the company around and turning it into a billion dollar company.

Max Toy on Computer Chronicles

Many of the print interviews emphasized the Amiga. In March 1988, Season 5, episode 17 of the PBS television series Computer Chronicles was about the Commodore 64. Max Toy received about 3 minutes of airtime in the episode. In the interview, he said more first-time computer buyers buy Commodore than any other brand and that they were still selling 1-1.5 million Commodore 64s every year. “It’s not old technology to a first-time buyer,” he said.

When asked, he told host Stewart Cheifet the C-64 was competing up and down the market, with parents buying C-64s instead of game consoles, and yet, also being used in small businesses, even for things like television production.

“Our greatest assets are our install base, our manufacturing and design capability to build a machine from the silicon up, and the fact we have such a strong user group community. The passion that the Commodore users have for the Commodore machines and what they’ve been able to do with those machines is absolutely incredible.”

About 13 months later, he was gone.

What went wrong?

The biggest clue about what Irving Gould was looking for came from the statements he made when Jack Tramiel resigned. Gould said Jack Tramiel wasn’t the right person to make Commodore a billion dollar company.

And with the exception of Ali, Gould followed a predictable pattern. He would hire a new president, give them what remained of the current fiscal year to get acclimated, and when they didn’t deliver a billion dollars of revenue in their first full fiscal year, he demanded their resignation.

Nobody ever got Gould his billion dollars. In some cases they were doing well just to keep the company profitable.

This also lines up with what Jean-Louis Gassée said. In the November 1996 issue of Amazing Computing, on page 45, he said Commodore tried to hire him in 1990. But he wanted 3 years without interference to turn the company around, and they wouldn’t agree to that. Gassée went on to found Be instead.

The other thing I think went wrong was Max Toy hired support people. Gould was in more of a cut-your-way-to-growth mentality. And that was what most other Commodore presidents did. It didn’t work. Commodore had two chip fabrication plants, but instead of modernizing the older plant, they closed it. As the decade wore on, they were saddled with and aging plant that wasn’t capable of producing the cutting edge chips the next generation of Amigas needed.

And then they solved that problem by cutting research and development. Get rid of those pesky next generation computers and then the fabrication plant you have will be just fine, right?

Toy went on to work for several relatively big-name technology companies after Commodore, having a longer career in technology than any other Commodore president not named Jack Tramiel.

That’s why I’m inclined to think he deserved more time than Commodore gave him.

Max Toy after Commodore

As Commodore executives go, Max Toy’s pedigree was better than average. It would have been interesting to see what he could have accomplished if he hadn’t had to share so much power with Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali. In an essay Toy published on Linkedin in August 2016, he emphasized the importance of coaching.

[N]ot everyone is coachable. Coaching is not for people who:

• Don’t think they need to change. As far as some people are concerned, their way of being and doing business is working just fine (despite the chaos going on around them).
• Think everyone else is the problem. It is impossible to help those who are committed to the idea that everyone else is the problem.
• [Are c]losed to examining the current strategy and the organization. If the individual is already heading in the wrong direction, coaching will only take them there faster.
• Who want to be told what to do. Coaching is about discovery and growth.
• For whatever reason, some may be anti-coaching. If someone is 100% anti-coaching, the worst thing you can do is force them into it.

He wrote this nearly 28 years after leaving Commodore. Undoubtedly the person he is describing is a composite, but it’s possible to hear echos of Gould and Ali in it.

Toy resigned from Commodore in April 1989. Former Apple VP Harold Copperman, whom Apple only hired in September of 1987, replaced him. Toy went on to work at software publisher Ashton-Tate, acquired by Borland, and Wyse Technologies, maker of PCs and thin clients, which was eventually acquired by Dell.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.