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SGI Faces Bankruptcy
Richard Finney writes "
The stock chart tells the story: One time Silicon Valley high-flyer and contender for the Unix crown, SGI stock price dropped 20% on Friday ... deep into penny stock territory ... after releasing fiscal fourth quarter results. The Mountain View, California maker of high end computers is '
exploring financing alternatives with its lender and other sources.' With mounting losses and investors giving ol' Silicon Graphics the thumbs down, things aren't looking good."
It's a shame to see a company that had such interesting hardware and operating system going down. I used IRIX on an O2, and loved it. Was way ahead of its time.
I hope someone buys them .. they've got good engineers. They introduced an affordable high quality LCD monitor before anyone else.
.. but Microsoft and others jacked some ideas from them like the login screen having users images etc.
SGI is responsible for evanglelizing visualization. (For example coming up with Open inventor and sponsoring Open GL etc)
Hope they stick around. Irix wasn't the best OS
But I have to ask, is there really any reason why to get an SGI today? I can see a company with an installed base of SGIs upgrading or what-not...but do they really offer anything new or different?
This is not a troll, it's an honest question. Back in the budding early days of the workstations sure, I could see getting these machines to work on 3D graphics etc etc. But now that 3D graphics cards are on regular PCs and Macs and both can run UNIX type operating systems, what does SGI or SUN for that matter have that you can't get elsewhere?
I'd be interested in knowing what others think about this or why they would keep going to SGI.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
...in Apple's belt?
...in Microsoft's belt?
...in Linux's belt?
or
I vote Apple.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
If NVidia wanted to release open-source drivers, they would have done that already. The thing is, it's about as likely as Microsoft releasing Windows under the GPL. Why would they give away one of their major assets?
I still can't figure out why anybody would buy a Sun box?
Because some people need big SMP systems with operating systems that have the features that big organizations need.
Linux-on-Opteron plus the OSS tool makers are getting there, but not yet.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It will detail the besieging of Irix, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and Unix and the ultimate demise of their parent companies.
You know which company created AIX, right?
Reading this article evokes a bit of a shock for me, so I go to the sgi site to check out what they are doing these days. I look at their workstations because thats what people used to buy, SGI workstations right?
700mhz or 800mhz MIPS processors?! 800mhz dual or quad processor boxes?! I see they have a whopping 4mb of cache these days but 800mhz MIPS processors were available in 2002. Even if $scientific_calculation function you want runs two or three times faster on MIPS than on a P4 you can get a 3ghz P4 for $285NZD these days. This is why SGI stock is tanking.
The only saving grace is that SGI still has a greater market cap than SCO ( 148.48M vs 70.44M ).
I am a lawyer and this constitutes legal advice and I shall indemnify you against any losses arising from taking it.
PowerPC in Apple, SPARC in Sun, and now MIPS in SGI...
Don't forget the DEC Alpha. Fastest CPU all thru the 90s.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
owned an indigo2 for a while, nice r10000 mips. nice having a 64-bit cpu and operating system back in 1999. well designed too.
the problem with sgi is that it's been living in the year 1995 since 1990, which was working well for it for a while, but when commodity gear just starts killing your performance and cost there comes a point where you have to move on to a new platform. this is like sun, except sun seems a little farther along and willing to keep pushing forward, while sgi just keep digging bigger and bigger holes for themselves.
sad, but the dot-com boom which fed these companies also birthed the commodity pc boom which killed them. i actually want to lump apple in that same catagory, but unlike the rest which stayed in their path and carved themselves farther and farther from the mainstream, apple kept pushing to keep their market position, and in pc's managed to keep their niche. surprising, but their success in the last few years had very little to do with their core pc business, and everything to do with i*'s keeping their brand warm.
just hope these same market forces end up killing the ms monopoly they created, an good open sourced os (not necc. linux) would make a lot of the hardware innovation that stopped post-lintel possible again.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
1. Make something that is X better than everything else.
2. Count on the fact that people will pay Y times the common average going rate for "the best".
3. Charge X*Y+Z where Z is an arbitrary high number chosen by management who are paying more attention to the stock prices than the computer science.
4. Neglect the fact that while many people will makes googly noises about "the best", they will go for "good enough" in proportion to the constant Z, and that this effect will increase over time.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
They are both assets. If you think drivers are so easy to write, why don't you try writing one? Here's a hint: the main difference between a professional card that sells for $2000 and a gaming card with the same chipset (which sells for $200) is the drivers.
NVIDIA has a very good and very fast OpenGL implementation, not to mention lots of optimizations and tricks. The driver is as much of an asset as the hardware; it's certainly just as important for performance. If you've ever used ATI's version of OpenGL (which is half-assed at best), you'll realize how much of an asset the driver really is.
I worked at Videologic when 3dfx were in their ascendency (comprising a lot of SGI engineers). We were producing some fine graphics chips (yup, the dreamcast STILL looks damn good to me ;-) and so were they, nVidia were giving us the TNT and TNT2 and _STILL_ SGI were trying to charge mega-bucks for performance that could be got straight from the shelf at a fraction of the price & AGP was just around the corner. 3DLabs (worked there too!) whose chips _are_ very good at geometry - a corner stone of 3D rendering - started making serious efforts on windows drivers... and the game was over for SGI
.com boom is over a lot of people still made a lot of money in share option trading at that time.
Yup, they should've done graphics cards. At one time they had all the knowledge they needed but i guess someone high up the company didn't like the competition or cut throat margins so decided not to. A lot of engineers jumped ship to nVidia or 3dfx, I guess they realised the money was goning to be elsewhere.
3D software ended up running OGL or DX under Windows using cheap 3D hardware. Since then few have considered SGI.
So... who killed SGI? Lack of "vision" really causing engineers to jump ship when they soppted opportunities elsewhere. Let's not forget that althhough 3dfx are gone and the
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
People buy/use Solaris (it's free now) because it is more secure, more scalable and all around more stable and better engineered. I know this will probably sound like a troll comment to a lot of people, but the fact is that the global Fortune 500 are still using Sun for their most critical systems for those reasons. Sun lost a lot of ground to Linux on less critical systems much like Windows lost a lot of ground to Linux. The reason was simple, cost. Linux was/is free and solid enough for file server, print serving, web serving, etc. Now that Sun has open sourced Solaris and radically changed it's cost structure, many of the Fortune 500's are starting to re-think their Linux strategies. I know because I consult to dozens of household name global corporations and it has been a common theme amoung them the last few months. These companies did not invest in Linux in the first place because they are Open Source fans or because they beleive Linux is a superior OS, they did so to save money and increase profit. Now that they can do that with Sun, which has much better support and vendor relationships the Linux momentum is really starting to lose steam.
While Linux is available for practically anything, including old SGI MIPs hardware, SGI never suggested people use anything other than IRIX on MIPs.
If you want to bitch to SGI about how well Linux runs on platfroms they don't support it for, while we're at it, let's give Microsoft a hard time about what a pain it is to run Linux on the xBox.
SGI's change to Linux is to support SGI's Altix line of Itanium based systems which inlcude the fastest commercially available supercomputer in the world (Number 2 on Top500 list - #1 one is a specialized IBM design that's not based a commercially available product like the SGI Altix)
Also, there are many spook agencies all over the world using SGI gear that you don't get very much publicity about. While these, unfortunately, are not changing the bottom line for SGI, I doubt that certain gov'ts - esp the US - will let SGI go into bankruptcy.
I've never publicly bitched about anything concerning SGI, and I always read a couple of threads in a newsgroup before posting. So I just sat back and watched. But a friend of mine had done the stupid thing, and posted a question. Result: hate-mail.
But notice: These people weren't SGI employees, they were users, participating in a SGI hardware newsgroup, and more vehemently hostile towards alternative OSes than any other sort of OS zealot than I've ever seen. And I did notice the Amiga fans in their prime.
Of course, the reason why people even want to run Linux on an SGI isn't so much their preference for Linux as it is caused by how hard it is to get hold of a legal or pirated copy of Irix (in addition to curiosity, of course: it's always interesting to try out exotic hardware). But for some reason, the SGI zealots choose to take this personally.
I've been working with Altix boxes for the past six months. They rock. The Numalink stuff works really well. I particularly like their FPGA boxes. The only competition for them in that arena is Cray, strangely enough. Nobody else can stream data into FPGAs at 6.5Gb/s straight out of the box. Nallatech, Starbridge, and the others are just wannabes in that arena. If SGI can get their FPGA boxes into the mainstream market they may have a chance for the Altix line to save them (or at least the engineers working on those ;-).
Unfortunately Sun
- Charges about as much as a low-end PC for the SunRay thin client
- Charges about as much as a mid-range business PC for the SunRay thin client if you want little frills like, y'know, a monitor.
- More or less requires the use of Solaris to use Sunray, which makes quite a bit of sense when you consider SunRay necessarily requires a hugeass multiproc server stowed somewhere, but which, seriously, is not something many people would want to use as a desktop OS. You could maybe sell the end user on Linux, if you set it up quite specifically. Solaris, um, that's a lot harder. The upshot of this is that SunRay probably only appeals to that small number of companies where everyone is or can expected to be a UNIX user.
So between these things, the only places I've aware of in the entire world using SunRay in a way that demonstrates its potential are large universities with big Sun contracts, and, um, Sun itself. If there's another business using this system I don't know what it is.I think this is kind of representative of Sun as a whole right now. They've got a WHOLE bunch of promising ideas and services and products. But they're not quite where they can be useful in a real world situation-- there's just those two or three simple-but-difficult-to-solve issues that hold it back from people buying it. In every case Sun could probably address these issues if they thought really hard about exactly who they wanted to buy this and why-- that is, they've got the neat tech but they don't have a clear picture of exactly what (not "it could be used in a multimedia telecommunications infrastructure!", an actual exact product) this tech should be used for in the real world.
In the meantime, the energy that could be used on figuring out how to leverage or market the things that Sun offers but no one else does (SunRay-ish stuff) is all being diverted into fighting uphill battles, mostly trying to keep a market presence for Sun's not-so-unique products-- for example, the Solaris vs. Linux fight-- which are still the cornerstone of Sun's business, but aren't necessarily the company's strength anymore now that similar or interchangeable products have become more commonplace.
I'm sure they're trying to figure this out also, and I'm sure there's some way Sun can change this situation, but I don't know when or if it will happen.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Completely untrue. I was at SGI at the time. The grpahics workstation business wasn't great, but not collapsed.
The original poster was completely correct, the Microsoft deal burned $300 million of much needed cash.
The Farenheight debacle was another aspect of it. *DONT* deal with Microsoft. Just don't. Ever. No matter how attractive it looks on the surface.
But greed keeps people thinking "but it'll be different for *me*. They won't screw over *me*. I'm different....). Wait until Microsoft pulls the plug on the Microsoft/NetApp agreements for more of the same.
Jeremy.
...and then does it - at least twice (MS-DOS and OS/2) - is someone to be watched. Preferably from behind something solid, a fair distance away from ground zero.
Anyone who whines about piracy and about clones while they're still using the very same piracy as a market invasion tool and copying (e.g. from Apple and Lotus) for all they're worth is pretty much guaranteed to screw you over too, no matter how much (or little) you're worth.
Anyone who promises to flood the world with quality software and then actually tries to sell you things like MS-DOS 4, Blackbird and MS-Bob is going to be right at home with Matilda's dad.
Anyone who prates on about standards and then ships first FrontPage and then MS-Word as HTML editors is pretty much guaranteed to be as two-faced about money as well. "OK, boys, buy him out!"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing