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SGI Announces Restructuring, Cuts 400 Jobs
kerneljacabo writes "Yikes! SGI seems to be the lastest victim of the economic downturn. Today they announced an extensive 'restructuring,' which includes releasing about 10% (400) of their employess. Seems like no one is immune." SGI claims this'll save them $40M, as well as improve their performance next fiscal year.
Thanks to Linux, Unix is now a commodity and corporations must find a new way to add value. You can't keep expecting people to buy the same product year in and year out. Linux is a success because like any other product, eventually it becomes a commodity like textiles and companies cannot charge a premium for commodities.
Software has the potential to be distributed almost cost free, and that demand for a commoditized Unix came in the form of Linux. Microsoft must commoditize Windows or else risk losing complete market share to Linux.
This is why SGI is in trouble. Unix can now run on commodity hardware on a free Unix clone, Linux. What SGI needs to do is invest in research for the next business cycle and NOT FIRE EMPLOYEES. Doing so will hamper its chances for survival in the future.
And how is that there are open positions displayed on their Careers page ?
So , Are they blatant fakes ?
or
Is the company merely using the time as an excuse to get rid of the chaff ?
Arent there laws which prevent companies from hiring immediately from a mass layoff ?
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
I'm sorry but they emailed me an offer like three weeks ago. The deadline to accept the position (software architect) is July 1st.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but they can withdraw that offer without a second thought. It's pretty crappy, but the people who extended it to you most likely had no idea that the layoff was coming.
I sadly was involved in layoffs at my work, and one minute I was talking to one of my employees about his 6-month/1-year/2-year goals, and the next, I was laying him off. I knew business was slow, but I didn't realize we were anywhere close to letting people go. That was in late 2000. We've had 2 more blood-letting since.
The other fun bit was that I had lined up a co-op position for a friend of my girlfriend. Without even telling me, HR withdrew the offer. I managed to get that fixed up, but if I wasn't "tight" with the right people, that coop would have been toast.
Well thatone is easy. On an amiga 500 the movement of the mouse cursor is actuelly timed to the screen update frequence, meaning that the mouse updates EXATLY once each vblank. The result is that when you move the mouse in a constant speed, the cursor also move in a constant speed. Something that no other hardware is able to do -(( (Yes, there are plenty things the new computers can do the old can't so I would not say the amiga 500 is better then the currently available computers)
Curse Intel and Apple for that #*&*$&*#$& usb mouse standart
...and basicly they fell victim to a disappearing market niche. PCs could do much of the same, at far lower cost. I think many of the "big iron" companies have had this problem, if your needs haven't scaled with the computing power, what before required a special solution can now be done on a standard Intel/AMD platform. Even in computing intensive applications like CAD/CAM/FEA (Finite Element Analysis) much of the time goes into creating the right model, not calculating it. At least that was my (limited) experience with it.
I think this is a problem for a lot of the "big irons". If their customers don't need them anymore, but can get away with commondity machines (PCs, laptops, thin clients instead of workstations and things like Athlon MP or Hammer servers, which are "light" servers in this context, they're screwed.
Of course some people need the big irons. But if I needed the power of a 3GHz desktop ten years ago, what would I have bought then? Five years ago? Now? The answer is very different, even though the needs stay the same.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Here's an interesting tidbit from SGI's site... some performance numbers of Intel's Madison (next generation Itanium) on SGI's Altix (Linux/Itanium-based machine running on Origin 3000 architecture)
a y/madison.html
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/m
The machine is limited to 64 processors per single-system image (O3K can handle up to 512 out of the box, or 1024 with a special kernel) but the Itanium2 is about 2x as fast as the MIPS R14K... plus the Itanium system can run a very slightly modified linux distribution (currently Red Hat plus SGI's ProPack kernel patches and additional utilities).
Pretty neat stuff for the high-end Linux market. Of course, the number of people that need Origin/Altix level system I/O is pretty slim...
SGI has been cutting jobs steadily for the last 4 years. This is one of the smallest job cuts in that time...
-- SJS smooge at smoogespace dot com
I don't think they are the victim of the economic downturn. People were wondering why they were still around even during the peak of the dot-com boom! In fact, several years prior, when they build that ugly "toon-town" building near the old Adobe HQ, people thought they were through.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One of the more regrettable things about SGI is that they spun off the MIPS processor division. My computer architecture class used the MIPS R22000 processor (1985) as the example through which to explain computer architecture. Evidently the MIPS processor had a very elegant and efficient instruction set when compared to most processors (some argue that ARM and Alpha are better, but hey).
Mips stands for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages, and it means that each instruction was executed in one cycle. Therefore, multi cycle depedencies ("locks") did not have to be accounted for, simplifying the design.
Unfortunately their design was not able to keep up mostly because SGI could not afford to stay on the bleeding edge of manufacturing techniques. MIPS lives on in embedded applications, but the last great computer processor was actually able to reach 1 Ghz!
Anyway, people who deal with assembly code (electrical engineers, and esp. compiler writers) can appreciate the relatively small and simple instruction set of the MIPS architecture.
I don't think SGI will be going out of business soon. They have a few cool machines up their sleeve. And customers for whom price is not much of an issue (US Govt. *ehem*) will buy them.