Bye bye, SGI
From this, to this, to this in fifteen years--the writing was on the wall at least ten years ago, of course, but it's still sad.
I was thinking a few weeks ago that there was no way SGI would make it through These Troubled Economic Times(tm), at least on their own, and I guess I was right. I wonder what would've happened if they'd stayed focused on what they did well instead of being distracted by trying to chip away at Sun's market, the interactive TV boondoggle, ignoring the fact that PCs would surely catch up (as the minicomputer displaced the mainframe and the microcomputer displaced the minicomputer), etc. Maybe there wouldn't have been the departures that led to 3Dfx and ArtX (though the former was in 1994, when SGI was at the top of their game). If they hadn't banked on Itanic, would they have been able to have kept MIPS ahead of x86? Would they have been able to have stayed far enough ahead of PC graphics to justify systems that cost an order of magnitude more? It seems like they could have only delayed the inevitable unless they'd actually found success in another market.
I was thinking a few weeks ago that there was no way SGI would make it through These Troubled Economic Times(tm), at least on their own, and I guess I was right. I wonder what would've happened if they'd stayed focused on what they did well instead of being distracted by trying to chip away at Sun's market, the interactive TV boondoggle, ignoring the fact that PCs would surely catch up (as the minicomputer displaced the mainframe and the microcomputer displaced the minicomputer), etc. Maybe there wouldn't have been the departures that led to 3Dfx and ArtX (though the former was in 1994, when SGI was at the top of their game). If they hadn't banked on Itanic, would they have been able to have kept MIPS ahead of x86? Would they have been able to have stayed far enough ahead of PC graphics to justify systems that cost an order of magnitude more? It seems like they could have only delayed the inevitable unless they'd actually found success in another market.