I don't know if anyone ever saw this, but the (in)famous John C. Dvorak wrote something about MSX a few months ago:

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?page_id=8284

I completely missed that one. The article is a bit presumptuous and flawed at times (you told him!) but, as far as the sales figures go, probably correct from an American point of view. What can I say: their loss! But if Mr. Dvorak remembers MSX there’s still hope!
Nah, just kidding!

Nice addition to his article, Manuel. His is a bit too much the American pov. without taking into account the rest of the world. It happens more often....

Indeed seems a bit flawed; but the diskdrive point is an interesting one. I never though about the reasons behind the lack of success on the USA...

>I never though about the reasons behind the lack of success on the USA...

I can tell you about the lack of success in USSR: MSX was super popular, but unreachable outside of educational institutions. A lot of teenagers, including myself, were ready to kill for MSX. 2 machines were stolen from my own school. It could be a huge success there !

So it makes me wonder again why there're no MSX clones (maybe Aleste?) in the USSR. The old USSR is the Spectrum clones paradise and I know that the hardware of this machine was very well know by the time...; but I can't understand why nobody tried to clone a MSX machine . I'm sure that its design could be easily reverse-engineered (not by me, of course)

ZX Spectrum = Z80A
MSX1 = Z80A + TMS9918 + AY-3-8910

Price of an MSX clone = Price of a ZX Spectrum clone x 3

I'm afraid that you're forgetting the poor ULA IC...
Sure it would be more expensive; but it would be also 3 times more powerful