SGI Sets Sights On Turnaround

grub wrote to us about an article about SGI, and its ongoing battles to turn its corporate fortunes around. The company's been doing interesting stuff for a long time - here's to hoping they stay around.

Comments

Doing interesting stuff?

[Axe]

Doing interesting stuff for a time? You mean, dropping good products, laying people off and trying to jump into PC business, cause their CEO reads magazines that say Dell is genious and everybody should be doing like Dell.. And then said CEO just leaves, after ruining the company? Interesting stuff indeed..

If they want a turn around - get the old name back for a start.. It always was Silicon Graphics for me, not a nameless TLA...

SGI was killed by it's greedy salesmen

[K8Fan]

I used to demo software for an SGI dealer, and learned to loath the company. The special hard drive mounting bracket for an Indy would cost more than the drive. The knob box cost $1500. Nutty prices.

But the thing that sealed their doom was when they didn't take the opportunity offered by Nintendo purchasing a huge number of R4000 chips. They could have taken the volumes offered by this to start selling MIPS chips to PC video card makers. They could have owned the entire video card market, and not suffered the brain drain that found all their best people working for competitors. Instead, their fat-cat sales force ruled against that move. They liked selling expensive workstations and servers to big clients for big bucks.

If they had played this card correctly, Nvidia would have never happened. Who wouldn't have wanted a "Silicon Graphics" game card? Instead, they were stupid greedy and they'll die. And they'll deserve to die.

Re:SGI was killed by it's greedy salesmen

[foobar104]

But the thing that sealed their doom was when they didn't take the opportunity offered by Nintendo purchasing a huge number of R4000 chips.

The Nintendo 64 was built around the MIPS R4300i embedded processor. It had limited R4000 instruction-set compatibility and a 64-bit execution unit, but it wasn't really related to the chips SGI used at the time at all.

So while selling tons more embedded processors would have been a nice bonus for SGI's MIPS subsidiary, it wouldn't have affected their core business on bit.

Market woes

[Waffle Iron]

Well, its going to be hard to sell pure number crunching at high prices when you can get a 1GHz PC at Best Buy for $599. (Imagine a you-know-what of those.) It's kind of like selling $18 CDs after Napster.

Anyway, I hope they stay in business. Their web site is the easiest place to remember when you need to look up something in the STL Programmer's Reference.

Re:Market woes

[MrDelSarto]

SGI equipment is not and never was in the same ballpark as a $AU1200 PC. A Beowulf cluster of 1024 PC's is not the same as an Origin 3000 of 1024 processors. Read about ccNUMA.

In terms of desktop processing, the I/O bandwidth of an O2/Ocatane can not be compared to a PC. In essence, that's where they differ from a PC with a GeForce. That's not to mention the video/audio hardware that comes built in that is well integrated into IRIX and for the most part well documented.

In general, with SGI you get what you pay for.

SGI is a great company (I've worked there) that's built on a culture of doing cool things with technology. They just seem to have made a lot of bad decisions. They seem to be returning to their core business now, i hope it works -- how many quaters have then been going to turn a profit next quater now?

Re:No mention of linux

[Anonymous Coward]

What is SGI's relationship to linux, and why doesn't this article mention linux once?

I'm posting this anonymously because I don't wanna get in trouble in case any of this is confidential. I don't think it is, but you never know.

SGI's official relationship to Linux is this: none whatsoever. At one time, there were some pretty serious plans to port core OS libraries, build abstraction layers and shims, and phase out the IRIX kernel in favor of Linux. It was thought to be easier to turn Linux into a real commercial-quality kernel (not my words; don't flame me!) than to port 60-odd million lines of IRIX to the then-proposed IA-64-based Origin 3000 variant. These plans have been informally shelved, meaning SN-IA is still a product on the roadmap, but nobody is working on it. It seems to have been put in the "maybe after McKinley" category.

(Take all of this as unofficial comment, of course, but this paragraph is total speculation on my part. I wonder if part of the reason IA-64 isn't really going anywhere in this market is because of the lack of a really good Fortran compiler for it. The MIPSpro Fortran 77 compiler, which I've worked with a lot, kicks ass, and I understand the F90 one does as well. Getting all of that tuned, optimized Fortran code to run on IA-64s seems to be a challenge for a lot of folks that are long-time die-hard SGI customers.)

SGI is officially committed to continuing to develop and ship systems based on the MIPS processors (R12000, R14000, and the upcoming R16K, and R20K) with the IRIX OS until further notice, which is to say that they're not opposed to exploring other options, but there just isn't any reason to switch that plan right now. The Origin 3000 server is a great piece of work, and the new lower-end Origin 300 is selling nicely, too. On the workstation side, believe it or not the humble little O2 is still selling briskly-- now with R7000 or R12000 processors, painted purple, and called O2+. Octane2 kicks ass, and a new workstation to be announced in January or February is also going to be based on MIPS/IRIX, combining Octane2 graphics with Origin 3000-style architecture.

So the official story is MIPS/IRIX forever.

Unofficially, SGI loves Linux. Check out oss.sgi.com sometime to see what SGI is doing with respect to Linux specifically (XFS, kdb, bigmem, NUMA, STP, etc) and Open Source in general (GLX, Inventor, Performer, etc).

SGI still around?

[BWJones]

Other than its ability to run on cheap (price and often quality) hardware, I still don't understand SGI's movement to Linux. I guess that I am showing my ignorance here, but it seems to me that Apple and SGI are in similar situations right now in some respects. Both companies historically have relied on income from the hardware side of things while making a closed OS/hardware system that for each of their respective markets is very effective. The difference between Apple and SGI however is that SGI already has a UNIX OS with a GUI (however difficult it is to manage but VERY extensible and powerful), and Apple is developing UNIX with a GUI (easier to manage, more powerful in some respects, etc etc etc...). Both companies need major transitions to survive, but why Linux/Intel? IRIX is already mature, stable, fast, with great graphics capabilities and IO capabilities, so I ask again, why move to Linux and Intel?

Both companies obviously want to benefit from the open source paradigm while still remaining in business with proprietary OS's. (I am guessing here for SGI as I assume that they will make their OS on a proprietary linux model) The approach Apple is taking certainly makes sense to me by developing a UNIX OS that includes the opensource Darwin, but I am totally clueless as to what SGI is doing here. What makes Linux more attractive than simply continuing to develop IRIX and putting more effort into improving, simplifying some features, and pushing development for IRIX on perhaps less expensive hardware? (among other changes to their business model) Again it seems to me that SGI is making another crucial mistake here as the developers that have tapered off work for IRIX have not for the most part started developing for Linux (although I know of a few examples), primarily they have lost ground to Wintel. (thus
their misguided attempt at Wintel/SGI boxes I guess)

In short it appears that they are trying to make Linux/Intel into what they already have in IRIX/MIPS, only with cheaper hardware which seems awfully dangerous to me for both end users and the company.

I believe that by 2005 SGI will no longer be in the low to mid-range workstation market. This market will belong to perhaps Linux/Intel or OSX/PowerPC. Right now for what my maintenance contracts cost me for a single SGI Octane, I can purchase a new G4 WITH a 22in Cinema display YEARLY! This is not even talking about the $40k initial acquisition costs.

SGI will survive in the server market and high end visualization market if they are not acquired by someone else. After all SGI's market cap is only around 585 million last time I checked.

Re:SGI still around?

[foobar104]

I believe that by 2005 SGI will no longer be in the low to mid-range workstation market.

I'm not sure how you define that market, but for my money SGI isn't in it now.

SGI's workstation products include O2+ (a special purpose machine), Octane2 (definitely high end), and Onyx 3000 (the highest of the high). There's going to be a new product coming early next year-- this is not a secret, although the details and case color are-- that sits below Octane2 on the price graph, but it isn't going to be a low- or mid-range desktop computer either.

I just don't see a way for them to do it..

[jcr]

SGI is caught in the classic problem that killed DEC, and is killing Tandem, Stratus, DG, and many others: the performance of the lowend is improving so quickly that we can do things on $1K machines that used to require $1M machines.

I have a friend who had an idea that could have saved them. When he was at SGI, he pointed out that machines that were optimized for graphics had to have great I/O performance, which would also make them great performers in another I/O intensive task: running RDMS engines like Oracle and Sybase. SGI management wasn't interested.

So, SGI employees and stockholders lose out, and the rest of us gain another lesson in the dangers of rigid thinking.

-jcr

Re:I just don't see a way for them to do it..

[foobar104]

SGI is caught in the classic problem that killed DEC, and is killing Tandem, Stratus, DG, and many others: the performance of the lowend is improving so quickly that we can do things on $1K machines that used to require $1M machines.

In a way, you're right. Every day I deal with the fact that SGI computers aren't cost-effective for general purpose tasks like file serving or database applications.

But at the same time, you've pointed out the reason why SGI is trying to do what they're trying to do. Some tasks that could previously only be done on SGI workstations can now be done on cheap(er) PC-type computers. I'm thinking of 3D modeling and image exploitation specifically, but there are lots of other examples, too.

So okay, SGI needs to get out of the desktop workstation business except where they can justify it. So they're doing that.

But there are some tasks that you've never been able to do cost-effectively on a PC-type system. Like high-definition or film compositing and editing. Sure, you can do film-resolution work with After Effects or Final Cut Pro, but it'd be so slow that you couldn't turn a profit doing it. So instead you buy a half-million-dollar Onyx and go to sleep every night on a big pile of money.

Now, for the first time, there's a desktop workstation that's capable of doing most of what an Onyx can do: Octane2. So now SGI is going to a lot of those customers that have Onyxes and asking them if they'd like to buy three or four smaller systems that do 80% of what the Onyx can do to augment their existing stuff. And many of them are saying yes, because (and this is the key) they already know they can be profitable doing it.

Of course, when SGI pushes down too far into the market space, they tend to get spanked a little. If you're doing standard-definition video editing, or god forbid compressed, you can do most of what you need with an Avid or Final Cut Pro on a G4. So SGI loses a lot there.

The trick: find the sweet spot, where the market is broad enough that you have a lot of customers to call on but not so broad that you get beat on price-performance, and sit there.

At the other end of the spectrum, there's the really high end. The Grand Challenge type stuff, like the project that motivated ASCI Blue Mountain at Los Alamos. If you're going to try to simulate a nuclear explosion instead of just setting one off and watching the pretty colors, you're going to need a computer that is several hundred times bigger than anything that had ever been built before. So there's an opportunity there to sell some of your big iron to the government, and (more importantly) to fund some R&D that will then trickle down to your commercial products so you can get back to beating the competition on features instead of fighting over price.

So yeah, in a way you're right. The low end keeps getting better. But as it does, we keep thinking of things to do-- both commercially and in the sciences-- that the low end can't handle. It's like swimming in the ocean. The waves are moving under you, and if you just sit still you're going to get dunked. But if you swim in the right direction at the right speed you can stay at the crest of the wave. That's the trick: to stay on the crest of the technology wave.

Re:SGI

[foobar104]

SGI used to be a real innovator in the field of graphics. Now it seems like companies like ATI and Nvidia are actaully doing more for that field.

You know, that's the funny thing about SGI's graphics hardware. InfiniteReality graphics first came out in January, 1996. Since then, SGI has put the same graphics processors on a new system interface for the Onyx2, and tweaked some components in the system twice (called IR2 and IR3, even though the changes were very minor).

InfiniteReality--apart from having the coolest name of any graphics subsystem--has remained essentially unchanged since 1996. IR today has slightly faster geometry processors and much more TRAM than the original IR, but in every other way it is identical.

That's six year old technology, baby. And the rest of the world is just now starting to catch up.

Guess that's why SGI has been selling the same graphics hardware for all this time. Because they can.

Love to hate SGI...

[thanq]

On September 13th I was looking at SGI's stock at $0.33 a share, and I was thinking about buying some of it.

I thought that the company had good prospects, even though it was failing at customer service, shipping ordered products, selling short and losgin a lot of money on a number of their x86 intel-based workstations.

They had built some amazing supercomputers for the national weather service, providing boxes for render farms for final fantasy, monster inc., and a bunch of other movie prodcutions (sorry, no time to look for links).

It seemed that it was the 'market analysts' and some disrgruntled customers and amazingly a lot of fear of 'restructuring' the company, that brought the stock price so low.

Somehow, I ended up not buying any. Now their stock is at around $2.14 a share.

I will be kicking my ass till I die that I didn't buy those shares.

It definately shows how much hype goes into inflating or deflating the stock prices and might not show the actual company value, performance, or ability to bring money to the stockholders.

I believe that SGI will come out on top after all.

takeover candidate = ibm? Re:SGI still around?

[StandardDeviant]

A takeover of SGI does seem pretty likely at this point. Here's some reasons why I suspect IBM would snap them up:

1. IBM has a much larger market cap and a fairly healthy balance sheet (this gives them the resources)
2. One of IBM's most profitable business sectors (or so a little birdy told me) outside of consulting is big iron and high performance computing, which is right up SGI's alley.
3. IBM has a large product base and customer base that center around Unix already
4. if IBM is serious about a Linux push, SGI is a source of skilled engineers who have also been working on Linux in the enterprise
5. it'd be one less competitor for all those cushy big-gov/big-edu contracts that IBM loves

Just idle speculation on my part. Sun is more of a pure-play Unix vendor, and thus might seem more appropriate as a takeover initiator, but I don't think their financial reserves are high enough to do it. Further, they're more of a "one-os, one-platform" company than IBM and would probably have a harder time assimilating the SGI folks/products.

Jeez, if SGI goes tits up, how many Unix (commercial) vendors will be left? Both HP and Compaq seem to be treating their unix offerings as an afterthought compated to cheap shitty PCs and winprinters. I guess just Solaris and AIX. God save us all from AIX being the only Unix out there...;-)

SGI's Failing Points

[Lethyos]

Yes, I definitely agree that SGI has done some killer things. They revolutionized the graphics industry and demonstrated that computers can be made to do visual effects never dreamed of. Their systems are powerful tools for research. All in all, they've been quite swell.

But, we don't need them anymore. Nor do we want them.

SGI offers big, expensive, proprietary solutions, that like Microsoft, lock you into their product line with little or no hope of escape. Let's discuss the reasons.

1. Lack of extensibility. SGI boxen typically do not scale well, and if they do, much of your hardware has to be replaced to accomplish any scaling. Ever try to upgrade an Indy? And O2!? I certainly understand that in any upgrade, sacrifices of existing hardware must be made, but they are no champions of modularity.

2. Proprietary hardware. SGI hardware, for its consumer price-level equivalents is not all that great. You can spend $16,000 on one or maybe two decent SGI systems, or you can buy 10-15 high-powered PC's and cluster them. You get the advantages of redundancy too. Another problem here is repair work. Nobody but SGI and SGI certified technicians can repair their hardware. Worse still, only SGI and a few licensed vendors manufacture SGI hardware replacements. More money here. And then there is Irix...

3. Proprietary OS and software. Irix is a disgrace. Certainly, it's a great performer, but because it's geared specifically to SGI hardware. Take Linux and optimise it to the same level and write good drivers, and you'd have not just a strong contender, but a superior OS. However, it's just not there and SGI doesn't want it to be. They're too proud of their OS and they want Irix tools to remain Irix-only so SGI software vendors can't take their products to other markets without tough costs. Since everyone does servers these days, SGI doesn't mind having Linux run on Challenge or other volume servers. Besides, everyone who wants Big Iron for www.hugefuckingcompany.com uses Sun anyway.

All in all, what SGI does for huge costs can be done in the PC scene with a fraction of the price. Perhaps not in Linux yet, but certainly in Windows with products from NewTek and ReelMagic for example. With nVidia around pumping out killer graphics hardware, what do we really need SGI for? I guess the only reason I can see is that they produce big solutions (who else will build a C.A.V.E. for you?). Can anyone clue me in on what it is exactly SGI does that we can't do everywhere else these days?

Re:SGI's Failing Points

[green pizza]

Proprietary OS and software.

It's UNIX. Sure, it's a *flavor* of UNIX, but its genetic makeup is 99% indentical to every other flavor out there. Golly, even the "SGI GUI" is just a modified version of Motif plus HTML and vector icon libraries, all of which are well documented. Over the past 10 years I've ported code (graphical, non-graphical, and device drivers) to and from IRIX with very few problems. And heck, most of the problems had to deal with REACT, SGI's real-time kernel extensions... something that nobody else in the UNIX arena had at the time (they're just now catching up).

SGI hardware isn't cheap, but it's worth every penny to those that need it. The same goes for the support contracts (which are cheap if you consider the short response times and 24/7 electronic monitoring). And for the high-dollar customers, SGI Custom Engineering is actually a bargain if you compare their services to that of other companies. For almost any user, the SGI developer program (www.sgi.com) offers A LOT for the price (nothing, it's free)... compilers, 40% - 70% hardware discounts, support & training discounts, and gobs of co-marketing opportunities. Plus they listen. Aside from two less-than-satasfactory incidents, my group has had no trouble talking to real SGI engineers when their help was needed. SGI management and executives have also always been willing to lend an ear. Of course... listening and *doing* are two totally different things, but I think the company is finally pulling its head out of its rear.

Re:SGI's Failing Points

[Graymalkin]

What the fuck are you talking about? Do you know anything about SGI hardware or software?

1. Saying SGI boxes do not scale completely invalidates any thought you've ever had in your life. Have you ever seen an Onyx/Origin system before? You add a brick and have twice the processing horse power or add 10 PCI (or any periphrial connection you ca nthink of) slots to do anything you want. You don't even have to turn the system off to add anything to it. Origins scale from 2 processor to 128 processor systems at the drop of a fucking hat. Using the Indy and O2 for your examples is just jackassery. Neither of which were designed for easy upgrades. Later revisions of the O2 when the Octane was released were easy as could be to upgrade. You turn the system off and slide out a processor modules and replace it with a new one. Voila.

2. Clusters fucking suck. Jesus get it through your Beowulf worshiping head that clusters are not the answer to all computation problems. LANL might build a bix cluster of PC systems to solve some embarrassingly redundant set of equations big fucking whoop. The big SGI systems are cache coherent and have messaging latencies measured in nanoseconds. A processor on one end of a 512 processor machine can talk to another processor with similar latency that a PC based system can talk to its own RAM. It is trivial to write software that spawns processes onto multiple nodes in a cluster, ccNUMA systems run as if their far flunt components were a single machine.

3. Linux cannot do that. If it COULD do that it would no longer be Linux and certainly would not be portable outside of SGI's hardware. Do you seriously think you can get good performance out of off the shelf software? Hell no. Optimizing software and good drivers doesn't mean anything. You've bitten far too deeply into Linux hype if you think it is even a contender to the grand daddy Unix systems.

Bringing up NewTek and ReelMagic cards is just fucking ridiculous. Wow you can have a hardware video processor that uses a PCI bus. That's rad...until you've seen an Origin in action running more than a dozen pipelines feeding 8 display channels. Try that with a PCI bus and see what happens. Nobody buys SGI for the logo.

SGI and marketing, wow factor

[green pizza]

SGI has always had a hard time trying to market itself. They've typically made endless incorrect assumptions and end up preaching to the choir. And yet, the wow factor that made the company and it's little cube logo a legend in the late 1980s is still there, abeit in a slightly different manner.

True, not everyone needs 512 or 1024 CPUs running on a single system under a single kernel. Or 16 graphics pipelines. But there are those that do. Which is why, shortly after the introduction of the Origin 3000 two years ago, an entire convoy of the machines were sent to Fort Meade.

It's almost as though SGI has gotten used to the high end, as though their technology (HW, SW, APIs, SDKs) no longer impress themsleves. Nowhere else, not even E&S, can a person find a platform that can drive up to 128 display channels (16 pipes x 8 channels per pipe) with perfect sync, or even at all. O2K and O3K (and more recently, O300 and Octane2) can drive multiple displays from one or more graphics pipelines. Raw, per-CPU performance isn't anything to write home about, but the thruput and latencies are perfect for generating insane 3D and mixing it with streams of HDTV... or anything. Think of a way-cool use of video and 3D. Now increase the complexity and choose, oh, 4 camera viewpoints. Maybe an additional display for stats and another for an "operators station". Easy with O2K/O3K (aka "Onyx" when gfx are invloved). It can be done and it's proven. They've been doing this sort of thing since you and I were using our "cutting edge" unaccelerated 2D graphics cards running at an "insane" 1024x768.

A pair of old demos SGI likes to show off are sometimes called "from space to your face", in which over 500 GB of sat photo textures are shuffled thru one or more InfiniteReality graphics pipes to provide a realtime "bungie jump" from the moon to earth and back. INSANE. 60fps/60hz locked. 4 huge disk RAIDs composed of dozens of drives grinding away like mad to keep the textures coming. WILD STUFF. All in a day's work.

SGI isn't about buzzwords or about wizbang marketing. It's about providing modular solutions to some of the most challenging problems. They've been there to provide HW and SW to those wishing to work on the cutting edge. In 1988 they were selling 3D workstations. In 1991 folks were doing crazy 3D and video mixing. Today their hardware can be used to drive gobs of displays and to shuffle huge amounts of data. Sure, the desktop PC in 2007 will be able to do the same thing. By then, PCs will be able to drive gobs of high end gfx subsystems, and even a cheap graphics card won't sneeze at several GB of textures loading and unloading every second... but until then, for those that need this TODAY, there's SiliconGraphics.

Let's hope SGI is here tomorrow to show us even more cool things.

Re:SGI and marketing, wow factor

[foobar104]

They've been doing this sort of thing since you and I were using our "cutting edge" unaccelerated 2D graphics cards running at an "insane" 1024x768.

A simulator project I worked on in '98-'99 used a 32-processor Onyx2 with eight pipes (4 RMs each) to drive seven out-the-window channels at 3200x3400@60 plus a heads-up display.

Not a type: 3,200 pixels across, 3,400 pixels down, 60 frames per second. Times seven channels.

I've been doing this for a while, and it made me stop and say, "Holy crap."

Make a pretty case, sell on the name.

[Snowfox]

Is it just me, or should SGI still be able to sell based on the name, if they take a rational desktop approach?

A pretty, curvy plastic case with the SGI logo prominently displayed, and they could probably compete with Dell for workstation products, while adding 10-15% just for the name.

I work in video games. Many of us, especially my artist coworkers, have worked with SGI extensively in the past. They miss the SGI platform, many with a fondness on par with that of the typical Linux, Mac or Amiga fanatic. And these people do have a voice when it comes to purchasing. If these guys thought they could get "An SGI that runs Windows," but at a sane price (they missed this part with their Windows endeavors), they'd jump on it.

Hell, I'd probably get one too, just for the novelty of it. A bona-fide SGI running Linux just feels cooler than generic PC hardware, even if I know the internals are identical.

There's probably a lot of money to be made in selling branded PC hardware. When Gateway bought Amiga, they could have probably sold thousands more units just by replacing front panels with something stylish and Amiga-esque, flashing a set of BIOSes with a snazzy "Amiga Phoenix" or similar logo & tossing a UAE CD and a Boing! mug in the box. There was no need for them to look into reinventing the PC, just like it was silly of SGI to go about trying to reinvent the PC when they tried shipping Windows products. Commodity hardware is rocketing forward so fast that most any attempt at creating custom hardware for your own PC products is purely daft. It's all about presentation.

Certainly, pretty cases wouldn't have to be SGI's only business line, but it could certainly be a source of safe & easy revenue to help turn things around.

Re:Bali and Odyssey... *sigh*

[John Carmack]

>Cutting edge graphics, where did you go? Please tell me there's more to the 3D world than IR,
>WildCat II, and GeForce3. Has *nothing* (other than cost) really changed over the past five
>years? It's almost as though I haven't missed anything in the 28 months I've been away from 3D

Dependent texture reads are the only really new thing in the last year or two (and only really got worked out right in the Radeon 8500), but next year is going to see floating point pixel formats, which was going to be one of Bali's truly important points. We should also see highly scalable boards built on consumer chips, which has been promised for years, but (with the exception of some 3dfx high end systems) not delivered properly.

John Carmack

They're doomed.

[mallan]

SGI keeps making mistake after mistake. I don't see how they have a snowball's chance in hell unless they axe their entire marketing team.

They came out with a pretty nice IA32 Linux workstation, the 330. Performance was good, the graphics smoked the O2's, and old IRIX customers were interested in porting to Linux. The machines were a little more expensive than what you could get from Dell, but SGI was fully supporting their machines. They provided documentation and APIs to help customers port from IRIX to Linux. The extent of Dell Linux support is "it should work on our machines."

The government and special effects industries have been two of SGI's biggest customers for years. Not only did SGI kill their IA32 Linux line before the government had a chance to buy them (the bulk of government spending comes at the end of the government's fiscal year. SGI dropped the 330 about a month before then), they killed their Linux line a couple of months before ILM decided to dump 600 O2 workstations in favor of Linux boxes.

They kept the 330 on the market for less than one year. People who wanted to get SGI AI32 Linux workstations never had an opportunity to buy them. If they had just kept their 330's on the market for another 3 months, they would have been selling them like hotcakes to former IRIX shops.

They're doomed. They've effectively handed away the Linux graphics workstation market to Dell, HP and custom shops.

SGI, in search of a purpose

[Animats]

SGI, as others mentioned, has the basic problem that the low end ate the high end in graphics and servers. They're a high-margin company in a business that went low-margin. Few companies survive that.

SGI has changed direction so many times in the past five years (moving into servers, deemphasizing graphics, selling NT workstations, deemphasizing servers, dumping the NT workstation line, reemphasizing graphics, acquiring Intergraph's line of overpriced NT workstations...) that customers can't rely on them following through on anything. And that doesn't even include the Cray acquisition and dismantling.

I noticed the remark in the article: "In its cost-cutting measures, SGI sold its nine buildings and leased back six of them." That's so SGI. This is right after they finished the new, zowie HQ building in Mountain View, and emptied out the fancy Silicon Studios building.

One big SGI success is Alias/Wavefront's Maya. That's one of the very few examples in the history of high-tech when a company bought two technology companies and actually got them to work together. Maya was a major advance, and dethroned Softimage|3D as the lead package in high-end animation. That's an incredible result from a merger.

Of course, they had to sell Maya on NT to make any money. So it didn't do much for SGI's hardware business.