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Reliving The Glory Days of SGI
devin15 writes "Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days? Wired is running an article about a group for whom the glory days of SGI have not yet gone. From the article:" If the Mac community is dwarfed by the Microsoft horde, the number of SGI users amounts to a rounding error.""
The whole 'UNIX workstation' market is gone.
Sun? SGI? HP? DEC?
Computers became powerful and inexpensive too fast. Clusters killed the big servers.
SGI faced the innovator's dilemma big-time; it was tricky to cannabalize their $2 billion workstation business for a $300 million graphics card market. And to move from being a full-system vendor to being a graphics card vendor. And even with all the management and business-issue problems, I noticed three problems their engineering effortsg never overcame:
- trouble with quality and shipping on time (see IMPACT)
- couldn't match/switch from 3-4-year development cycles of the workstation business to 6-month product cycles of the PC graphics card business
- engineers were loath to give up control of the chipset/box/OS in order to settle for just controlling the graphics subsystem. They tried to be a full-system player in a PC world. Given that Compaq couldn't really do it (something that was at least semi-obvious at the time), its not a surprise they, coming from the workstation space, couldn't do it with their integrated NT workstations.
- The engineers were delivering product that was differentiated but not in the areas that the biggest customers cared the most about. The benefits of UMA (unified memory architecture) graphics just weren't in sync with what the market most wanted: the fastest 3D at the cheapest price. And in the classic workstation space, polygon-pushing was what was most needed. Half their business was CAD workstations and in the end they lost that to Sun/HP/IBM who didn't have the sexy texture mapping stuff but could render polygons "good enough".
SGI also benefitted from many years from the other workstation vendors under-investing in 3D graphics. When that era ended, even the workstation business they were in got a heck of a lot more competitive.
Anyway, that's what comes to mind when I remember back to SGI in the mid-90s. In hindsight, I don't know of any silver bullets that would have gotten them out of the situation; it was death by a thousand cuts. At the time, I wondered if a merger with Apple would have made sense but it wasn't clear that the disfunctionality of the two organizations at the time would have melded into something better. Maybe a damn good CEO could have helped them carve out a more defensible role in the industry; that's the only thing that got Apple through as far as I'm concerned.
I think they failed because they didn't sense the change in the PC market. Back in the early and up to mid 90's professional 3D graphics and visualization was synonimous with SGI. I worked for a company that developed one of the major CAD/CAE/CAM product and everyone on their desk had an SGI. If you were a co-op like me you had an older one, if you are the manager you had a R12000 one with 1Gb or ram. In the basement in the "vault" we had a quad R12000 with 4 Gb or ram to crunch huge matrices for CAE. Then around the year 2000 consumer 3D graphics cards and CPUs became more and more powerful and caught up with SGI's products. I could spend about $1000 and get a PC that was 3 times as fast as the SGI on my desk at work which was probably bought for $4000. SGI just couldn't stay ahead of the market and they never lowered the prices to make their machines competitive with PC. I still don't know many people who have or had an SGI at home, they were just too darn expensive.
Another thing is, after the tech bubble burst companies that before had plenty to spend all of the sudden had to cut corners, and one of the corners were the very expensive SGI workstations that could be replaced by Linux boxes or Windows PCs.
No, that's really the opposite of what happened. "Rocket Rick" Belluzzo saw the shift in the market, but he reacted to it in precisely the wrong way. Rather than trying to develop subversive technologies to undermine the PC market shift, Belluzzo decided to try to outsource SGI's workstation business, turning it into just another PC manufacturer.
Right now, companies like ILM are tearing out SGI workstations and replacing them with ultra-cheap desktops. They're taking advantage of the ability to work with low-resolution proxies in real time and then render jobs overnight on the big iron. That's a good workflow for that environment.
SGI should have been their first. They had the big iron --nobody has bigger iron, even now; SGI's supercomputers are more scalable than anybody's. They should have developed software frameworks that facilitate remote rendering of graphics operations. How? I don't know; I'm not a graphics expert. But they should have been first on that block. Then SGI could have gone to a company like ILM and said, "We'll sell you a thousand server processors and a thousand one-processor desktops for five million bucks."
Instead, SGI said, "Fuck the desktop. The server business will boom forever!" Which was a huge mistake.
SGI's failure is that they tried to adapt to the dominant paradigm instead of recognizing its limits and engineering ways to get around them. They reacted instead of created. And they lost vast sums of money in the process.
I write in my journal