Why is Alan Sugar so rich and successful? Over the last 30 years I have bought 3 AMSTRAD products. In the mid 1970s I bought an amplifier, in the 80s and 90s I bought a word processor and satellite box. All three were to quote Sugar "tut"

How has he got away with it for so long?

I bought some of his PCs for a work project 20 years ago. Simple and cheap. You DO get what you pay for. They were absolutely OK for what we paid.

They made Sky boxes too. But most of his money has been made from property investments.

The first computer I ever bought was an Amstrad CPC464 - I loved that machine, it was easy to use, everything came in one box and there was no messing around with leads. Reliable too, I hung onto it for years after it was technically obsolete.

I wasn't the only one either - wasn't he selling something like a quarter of all PCs sold in Europe at one point? (As someone said back when the first series was on and Sugar was boasting about how Bill Gates took his calls - if he'd shown more long term vision back then he could have been Bill Gates). I don't know if computers were what made him a multi-millionaire, but they must certainly have helped.

The only Amstrad product I've bought since though was a Walkman-type portable tape player - it was rubbish

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad

they were one of the first to produce home consumer electronics and PCs

they also made millions of sky boxes

I had an Amstrad $ky box
When I was in my first band (c.1986), one of our members had an Amstrad Hi-Fi with a four track recorder which we used for our first demos. It was pretty poor (lots of "bleeding" of tracks), but it was a cheap way of recording some demos and introduced us to some of the techniques used in pro recording studios. It is doubtful that I would have become such an influential artist today without the help of Amstrad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyewGF9xkmE
Last edited by ZListersMustDie : 13-06-2008 at 12:42

Similar to the late Paul Raymond - the image was of the top shelf magazines & the strip joint, but in reality he made most of his money from shrewd property deals.

when i bought one of my first computers, an Amstrad CPC 6128, along with an Amstrad DLP ???? printer (I forget it's title) your average dixons was full of his PC's, home computers, peripherals, hifi's, tv's, videos etc etc.
He was huge at the time in the budget end of the brown goods and pc markets.
He definitly could have been the next Bill Gates, but a couple of stupid decisions buggered him up, including purchasing Sinclairs lot and of course Spurs.

Years and years ago I had an Amstrad games console....must have been way back in the 1980's though!!!

But he seems to have a much more stable and happier home life and hopefully will not end up a very rich but lonely and bitter old man as Paul Raymond did.

I'm pretty sure my first word processor was an Amstrad - a PCW 912, I think and it was so easy to use. At work I used various PCs including an early Apple Mackintosh and I much preferred my Amstrad. The only reason I got an IBM PC was because I needed different fonts and a less noisy printer..... the PCW's was a daisy wheel printer so it was slow and made a terrible racket.

The best twin VCR I ever had was an Amstrad.

It had long and short playback and record which wasn't that common back then. You could record from one deck to the other and edit your tapes. That saved me a fortune on video cassettes and made my collection of tapes more coherent.

I could record a TV/Sky programme on one deck while playing a video film on the other - absolutely brilliant and I had that machine for ages.

I looked everywhere for a similar machine but found it irreplaceable until now. I've just bought a VCR/DVD machine which I hope will let me edit my VCR tapes and record them to DVD.

Oh absolutely - Raymond was a classic example of money not being everything.
Perhaps something the candidates themselves would do well to remember - I still cringed when Sara was shown again saying something like buisness was about "Making money, making money and making more money".

I agree but it didn't really fit in with the way she deported herself in general.

It was a sort of reverse: "I think the lady doth protest too much". She probably thought (or was told) she would come across as too 'nice' so wanted to get over the point that she took business seriously.

I loved my amstrad word processor, I wouldn't swap back now of course but at the time it was brilliant, very easy to use for a non-techie like me.

I often wondered about Jenny M's "I'm probably the best salesperson in Europe" line - surely a put up by the producers?

I wonder how many of the quotes were produced by Talkback just to give the candidates a "hook"

Potential Apprentice candidates should watch this advert! They could get some inspiration.

I bet SAS loved it, especially the reverse explosion.

i had a pc from them in the 80s

Another Amstrad PCW owner here, 9512 from what I remember. Big as a house & with a very temperamental printer, but it did what it claimed to. It's probably still in the loft somewhere, if only you could still get those discs.

I had a PCW word processor which was really useful and did the job.

I've got one of the email phones with the screen, I was given it as a spare phone - it's pretty pants though other than it just being a phone!