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SGI Faces Bankruptcy

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dire-straits dept.

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."

31 of 383 comments (clear)

  1. Make a deal with the devil... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And you lose. I'm pretty sure that SGI's downward spiral can be directly attributed to their little tangle with the Beast of Redmond.

    The zombie corpse of SGI, stripped of its important 3D computing patents which went mostly to NVIDIA and Microsoft, has been shambling around for a while now, but it will take a miracle for it to pull back from the edge.

    1. Re:Make a deal with the devil... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yep. They're just one more Microsoft partner turned victim.

      More recently, SGI has been working with Linux, which means that Microsoft really wants SGI dead.

      And that means that you can't trust the price of SGI's stock to provide an honest picture of what's happening in SGI. Even if SGI does the necessary financial restructuring, and improves their financial outlook, their stock will remain low, because that's where Microsoft wants it to stay. When you have enough money to burn, and you don't care about the law, it's easy to manipulate the stock price of a smaller company. Microsoft did the same thing to Corel when they were trying to arrange some bridge financing, and their Linux business was starting to grow.

      The good news is that it may not be as bad as the Slashdot article says. Unlike the intro blurb, the linked article does not mention bankruptcy. Instead, it shows a 10 percent loss on $170 million revenue. That's in the "fixable" range.

      Over the next while, I expect to see a lot of FUD aimed at SGI, in order to discourage investors from providing SGI with any financial assistance. That's another thing that Microsoft did to Corel.

      Unlike Corel, I think SGI has a fairly good chance of getting past this. Corel's business was mostly based on Windows, via WordPerfect and Corel Draw. Corel's business was therefore very vulnerable to various Microsoft tactics, and it's no surprise that business had been shrinking for years.

      SGI, on the other hand, does not have the same sort of ongoing problems. Instead, SGI's problems stem from their past, and much of that was arranged by Microsoft. You may recall former SGI CEO Rick Belluzzo, who was instrumental in changing SGI's business from their own brand of high-end computer hardware, to a strategy based on Windows NT:

      > Belluzzo gave customers another reason to stick around: The Visual Workstation, a Windows NT machine that carries SGI's trademark slick design and dazzling graphics--but not its premium pricing. Instead, he's plunging SGI smack into the rough-and-tumble business of making high-volume workstations based on Intel and Microsoft standards.

      That was the same Rick Belluzzo who made similar moves while working as Executive Vice-President at Hewlett-Packard, with similar negative results for that company. Belluzzo later got a job as COO at Microsoft, which many viewed as a reward for his work at SGI and HP.

      Anyway, the point is that those problems for SGI are in the past. SGI's current business is based on their strengths, in the areas of high-end computing, and computer graphics (e.g. for Hollywood), which includes consulting, and work on Linux. While, as history has shown, Microsoft can still do things to try to cut off SGI's air supply, at least SGI's business is not tied to Windows, which makes them less vulnerable than Corel.

    2. Re:Make a deal with the devil... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What the fuck are you talking about? Since it's impossible for any filesystem to be perfectly reliable in the face of arbitrary hardware failures, filesystems don't need to take hardware into consideration in order to be robust. You can simply desire that:

      1) if the hardware is running smoothly, the filesystem never fails
      2) if the hardware screws up in any way imaginable (aliens come and rape your hard disk while you're sleeping), the filesystem never fails to return to a perfectly working state (as if nothing had ever happened) and with a low amount of data loss.

      With XFS, you can tune the amount and nature of data loss in the case of hardware (power) failure. The default (which many people don't like) is to emit NULL for any region of a file that was known to have had writes that were not committed. This is arguably BETTER than filesystems that will simply give you the old contents of the file, even though the filesystem could have known that there was an uncommitted write. Of course, XFS can let you have that exact same behaviour, on a per-file basis.

      XFS also gives you advanced quota support and guaranteed-rate I/O, but most people don't need that.

      However, you shouldn't need to be a freaking guru to add the four letters "sync" to your /etc/fstab and mount any super-critical filesystems synchronous, so that power failures lose the least amount of data possible (and you take the accompanying performance hit.)

      In short, XFS' default configuration is top speed and high reliability only on high quality hardware setups (UPS or whatever), and this has surely bitten a lot of people who didn't bother to find this out/test things first/read the fine documentation.

      There is absolutely nothing about XFS that stops you from making it as reliable as any other filesystem, however. I don't see how a filesystem can not be "memory-to-disk". I guess you mean "buffered" (asynchronous) - you can turn that off dude.

    3. Re:Make a deal with the devil... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well I was there through the duration and both you AND the parent poster was correct.

      When SGI bought Cray BUT let SUN keep the E10000 it devastated SGI's high end business and did make SUN a fortune. SGI couldn't really of sold the E10000 since it was SPARC and Solaris based, but hindsight being 20/20 though should have axed it. Or better yet they shouldn't have touched Cray with a 10 foot pole in the first place. That merger was an unmitigated disaster like most everything McCracken and TJ did. Cray and SGI were going out to the same customer and backstabbing each other. Not good.

      Jim Clark had the vision at SGI. Towards the end of his days there he started walking around pointing out the PC was going to bury overprices workstations and SGI, and eventually he was run out by McCracken. It was bad he was walking around saying it, but he was totally right.

      SGI's workstations first missed with the Impact because of production problems on the texture memory(and it was way overpriced). They missed again with the O2. It was great for video and some texture tricks. They advertized this 1 GB memory bandwidth but neglected to tell anyone that the CPU couldn't get over 80 MB/sec to and from RAM. You want to evaluate a computer run the STREAM benchmark so you know the sustained bandwidth to memory. A Pentium Pro of the era could easily do 200 MB/sec. The end result was unless you were using the special hardware for special applications, or your app worked in data cache it was a complete and utter dog. I'm certain it helped insure ILM made so many bad movies during the years they had nothing but O2's. They were an anchor around the necks of artists, and anyone who saw them run Maya or Softimage side by side with a PC, wanted stick a dagger in to their O2.

      Octane's were nice enough machines, better memory system than the O2 but they were very over priced and the MIPS architecture simply couldn't keep up with IA32. SGI didn't have the money or the focus to compee with Intel especially after Intel outright stole all the secrets that made the DEC Alpha so fast.

      SGI was doomed in the workstation business, the day Intel stole the Alpha's secrets from DEC and they did outright steal them, and it led to Pentium Pro, etc. It caught the IA32 architecture up to RISC almost overnight. The second blow was Windows NT which was good enough to run workstation class apps like Softimate, Maya, Pro/E etc. The third blow was Microsoft buying Softimage and porting it to Windows NT and Pentium Pro which started the rush away from SGI.

  2. huh by user32.ExitWindowsEx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    maybe nvidia will buy them (thereby fixing up lingering IP issues) and be able to open-source their video drivers.

    --
    "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
    1. Re:huh by AnObfuscator · · Score: 2, Interesting
      maybe nvidia will buy them (thereby fixing up lingering IP issues) and be able to open-source their video drivers.

      Or maybe ATI will buy them and screw nVidia over with IP issues. I mean, ATI has 650 million in cash, and it will only cost ~170m to buy a controlling interest in SGI. And SGI has more than enough oustanding shares.

      If *I* were in charge of ATI, that's what I'd want to do -- then again, i'm excessively machiavellian. :)

      --
      multifariam.net -- yet another nerd blog
  3. extremely unfortunate. by bagel2ooo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Unfortunately, when the hardware was new I was not able to afford it. Currently I own an Indigo, Indigo2, and an O2. They are very capable and suprisingly rounded machines. I was concerned with SGIs direction during their stint of windows clusters but with the linux superclusters they've been working on lately and some of the rekindled movement with the workstations, I have been very hopeful of a bit of an SGI revival. Hopefully, they will be able to recover from this. If not, I know that many people will be greatful for the contributions they have made.

    --
    ( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
  4. Re:Well.. by Zeinfeld · · Score: 4, Interesting
    They could always sue Linux.

    Linux has always been a much bigger competative threat to UNIX vendors than to Mr Softy in Redmond.

    SGI had a ringside seat for the Web revolution, all the Netscape stuff was written on SGI. Sun trounced them because SGI made the mistake of concentrating on the 'high end' and abandoning the comodity computing area. Also all that Java mumbo jumbo somehow led people in the Internet world to think that everything had to run on Sun.

    DEC also disappeared, rmember the days when they were second only to IBM and growing faster? IBM is no longer in the PC business and its mainframe business is all but dead. They are now a consulting company that makes a few unix boxes.

    Clark predicted that SGI was on the road to ruin back in 1994 when he quit. They have been a shell for years. Pretty much all the former SGI offices off Shoreline and Charleston were taken over in the 90s.

    This is like the death of Cray or Symbolics, by the time the company finaly disappears its ten years later.

    --
    Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
    Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
  5. This is very sad by Darth+Maul · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have an Indy. I used in in college for CS work, and it was perfect. Learned OpenGL stuff, etc. I was the biggest SGI fanboy. evar.

    I was actually at the event that started the complete destruction of SGI. It was summer 2000 in New Orleans. This would be SIGGRAPH 2000. I actually presented a paper, and was invited to the SGI party at Anne Rice's humble adobe. This was the day of a "big annoucement", and we were ALL expecting SGI PC graphics cards. Taking the SGI name and technology into the new up-and-coming PC graphics card market was the brilliant move we all expected. Compete with nVidia, and take names.

    What did they announce? Some newer, bigger supercomputer thingy. You could taste the silence in the room.

    That was the day, certainly in my book, that sealed the fate of SGI. After that, PC graphics cards just exploded onto the scene, and the whole reason for getting an SGI became moot.

    I still love Irix, and can't believe how amazing the Indy is that I bought back in 1994. Still is a great machine, and it's a shame to see SGI finally near the end.

    --
    --- witty signature
    1. Re:This is very sad by speleo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I had an SGI PC graphics card back in '91 or '92.

      It was a big ISA card that took up two full length slots.

      At the time I worked in QA for a large software company that did graphics software for the PC (and UNIX ports, too) and SGI loaned us a few of these things to beta.

      They worked well but the drivers were somewhat buggy. I don't recall what happened but I figure the market for PC graphic cards that cost more than the PC wasn't destined to be a big seller back in those days.

  6. Does this.... by shreevatsa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Mean anything for the STL? I mean, is SGI still working on the STL, and will it continue to keep its excellent documentation publicly (freely) available, etc?

  7. Re:Shame by tgd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Thats pretty debatable. The O2's were overpriced and underpowered, and Irix was SUCH a pain to work with. SysV but things just didn't quite work the same as other SysV boxes.

    SGI had gone from making significant high end hardware to making an attempt at the "trendy" market that Apple did such a good job being successful in. During the dot-com hype in the late 90's, they were pushing case design and graphics demos as justification for overpaying for their hardware.

    They were already on the way down at that point. The decision shortly after the O2 systems were introduced to start selling vastly overpriced PC-compatible Intel hardware was the nail in that coffin. (Lets hope Apple weathers that decision better than SGI did! There's a LOT of parallels between the two, only Apple has had success where SGI had failure).

    I think the last real significant (from a market innovation standpoint) hardware SGI really was selling was the Indy line, but even those were form-over-function and were mostly useful because at the time they had a real stranglehold on high-end graphics production.

  8. They should have got into the graphics card market by delire · · Score: 3, Interesting



    I said this years ago when working for a VR centre using SGI systems and saw the centre migrate more and more of their workstations to cost and performance effective NT systems.

    NVIDIA were becoming a big player, yet SGI was responsible for the extremely popular 3D library we were using.

    Their arrogance was partly to blame, they never did confess that the gaming industry would come to define the "3D graphics workstation" and that VR was fast becoming a ghost train. Instead they sent girls around in push-up bras selling upgrade licenses.

  9. Thats not trolling at all. by tgd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Its a question they should've asked themselves six years ago.

    Sun has the advantage of being the "standard" for enterprise Unix applications. They're hurting but thats sigificant.

    SGI (aside from the Cray stuff) hasn't offered anything over other systems in half a decade.

    I used to work for a SGI VAR, and even seven years ago, most of the customers with existing installations were already looking and moving off them. The issue was people generally hated Irix, and as non-Irix hardware got better, the pain of changing platforms was mitigated by the pleasure of getting away from Irix. I commented in the parallel with Apple in another reply. SGI made the switch to Intel (or attempted it, I have no idea these days if that stuck or not) but unlike Apple, they had nothing to offer when they moved off MIPS. People didn't like their OS anyway.

  10. Let us mourn... by AnObfuscator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... the loss of yet *another* innovative & powerful system architecture ... yet another victim of the cheap-ass & now all-conquoring x86.

    PowerPC in Apple, SPARC in Sun, and now MIPS in SGI... one wonders how long PowerPC/POWER will last in IBM's workstations & servers...

    I love commodity hardware from a social perspective -- cheap, standardized, capable hardware means access to vast quantities of information is becoming practically free for a rapidly increasing percentage of the world's population. On the other hand, I can't help but feel a substantial pang of loss as these non-standard platforms are, despite innovative and arguably superior design, destroyed only by the economy of scale. Alas.

    RIP, SGI. You were damn cool while you lasted.

    --
    multifariam.net -- yet another nerd blog
    1. Re:Let us mourn... by linguae · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Err, the SPARC is still alive and shows no signs of dying, even though Sun is now selling Opteron workstations. I believe you can buy a 500MHz SPARC workstation for about $1,400 or so. I don't know how fast it is in comparison to x86 machines (I'm typing this on a 475MHz K6-2), but at least Sun is still making them.

      But yes, this is sad. All we have left is the PowerPC (which we only have a year left before Apple goes to the Dark Side(TM)), and the Sun SPARC. All of the elegant and good architectures have been destroyed based on the Microsoft/Intel juggernaut, compatibility with ancient DOS programs from 1983, and cost. It just shows that just because something is technically superior doesn't mean that it will succeed in the marketplace; look at NeXT for instance (even though it didn't die, it was able to buy Apple for negative $400 million). If a product doesn't make it through the Joe Sixpacks and the PHBs of the world, with their malware-encumbered computers and probably don't even know what a processor is, it automatically fails, no matter how good it is.

      SGI machines remind me of the NeXT machines; they were extremely powerful workstations. You can't get the graphics and the processor performance from some inferior cheap x86 box. Yet, the philosophy of "worse is better" holds true again, and before we know it, us computer scientists, graphic designers, and other people who really do need ultra-powerful workstations will have to rely on Dells to do their work. You can clearly see that I'm pissed off.

      Now if you excuse me, I'll go off and mourn.

  11. The days of high -end hardware are over by pongo000 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Back in the mid 90's, I wrote software for a commercial satellite imaging system (now part of Space Imagining). SGIs were the workstation of choice: Very high-end, graphics without compare, in-depth support for parallel processing, and relatively fast. Cheap they were not (not to mention a fairly buggy C++ compiler in IRIX that took up many hours of our time...usually very esoteric bugs that even stumped the SGI folks).

    Back then, the rumor was always floating around that SGI was considering moving from Irix to Linux. (Did I hear correctly that they finally did, years later?) Amongst ourselves, we would talk about there was no way Linux would be able to replace Irix (remember, this was '96!), and that it would be a mistake for SGI to go this route.

    How wrong we were...SGI, like Cray and some of the others mentioned, refused to give up their hold on proprietary high-end hardware, and have fallen hard. Now that the hardware market has become commoditized, with throw-away PCs, there's really no need for companies like SGI, Sun, etc. Sun, to their credit, has tried to bail from their sinking ship by making overtures to the OSS crowd and by delving into software, but they may have been too late to start manning the lifeboats. But it's my belief that Sun's days are numbered as well.

    So a hearty farewell to SGI. I just hope they go down swiftly and silently.

    1. Re:The days of high -end hardware are over by ThreeToe · · Score: 2, Interesting

      So a hearty farewell to SGI. I just hope they go down swiftly and silently.

      Nothing swift about it, I assure you. I worked at SGI as an intern and then as a full-time employee in 1999. My team was restructured out of existence about six months after I joined the company.

      I joined SGI at the same time a good friend did. Since we were both recent college hires, SGI was reluctant to let us go. I decided to leave, but my friend stayed. Since our entire division had been axed, the online org chart showed him reporting directly to the CEO, Rick Belluzo! That apparently lasted for several months.

      (And, funny thing, Rick Belluzo ended up having a short and not particularly excellent term as an exec at Microsoft, too. Gates and Ballmer no doubt quickly realized what a fumbler he was.)

  12. last time we had financial problems on slashdot... by skogs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    the financial problems were from TiVo. Everybody thought that it was stupid, and their leadership had just left. Everybody mocked me, as I shoved otherwise unused 15,000 from my portfolio into them. I would like to say that right now, if I pulled it right now, I would gain significantly from it. I'm going to wait some more time. With SGI I'm not sure. Their market seems weak to me. They still make superb and beautiful hardware, but I am afriad it is nothing that in a corporate environment I couldn't duplicate. Not identically at any rate, but I could certainly grid the corporate work environment and achieve at least competative results...and I could do it cheaper. The major university number crunching has also been well proven to be able to be run on our 'limited' hardware we store under our desks. Now, don't flame me because I think this AMD and INTEL hardware under our desks is good. Far from it, SGI's hardware whips the poo out of them. But its kind of like this: Never get involved in a land war in asia.

    --
    Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
  13. SGI attempted to get in PC graphic card... by bubbaD · · Score: 2, Interesting

    some interesting comments from an another discussion.
    http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=132599&thre shold=0&commentsort=3&tid=139&tid=130&tid=218&mode =thread&pid=11072394#11072938 check out the parent comment
    SGI was probably incapable of adapting.

  14. Apple should buy them out by theolein · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Their engineers and their software libraries alone should be worth quite a tidy sum and at least Apple would put the stuff to use in some or other product (some high end 3D package that does for 3D what FCP did for video). Microsoft would almost certainly mess it up if they bought them up.

    That said, the fact that buyers are not exactly beating down SGI's door speaks volumes in itself.

    1. Re:Apple should buy them out by suitepotato · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Their engineers and their software libraries alone should be worth quite a tidy sum and at least Apple would put the stuff to use in some or other product (some high end 3D package that does for 3D what FCP did for video). Microsoft would almost certainly mess it up if they bought them up.

      That said, the fact that buyers are not exactly beating down SGI's door speaks volumes in itself.

      Hey, those with mod, points... mod parent up, please. The poster makes a good point. Bear with me here, I'm going to address the second line first and proceed to the first.

      For years, SGI was seen as the platform for CGI but SGI was indeed one of the biggest bunch of arrogant bastards I ever got within ten feet of. I requested some information and nothing more and they ignored three requests and on the fourth called me and asked to meet with me at a local sales office. I asked to be sent their printed marketing material first before I would meet with them and they point blank refused and insisted on speaking with me in person at which point they'd hand me the literature.

      So I reluctantly agreed. I was looking to start a small CGI business for local broadcasters and video producers and what was on the PC platform was just not fast enough for the time frames that prospective clients were asking for. Of course, what the fark would they know, but I digress.

      I got there and they gave me the full court press. I told them at the outset that the package would have to be solid and self-consistant and problem free. I could teach myself anything they had, that wasn't the issue. Price and performance was. If it was right I might be able to swing $100K in financing toward it with the backing of some interested people. But I had to show them that it could be done in one shot.

      The SGI sales people basically ignored everything I said, kept pressing me on their most expensive machines, and kept encouraging me to blow off my would-be partners and find someone willing to go in on a deal of at least $1.5M. I wasn't planning on any such level, made it clear, they ignored me, gave the full court press, continued on.

      I ended up walking out as gracefully as I could, after it became clear they had no intention of settling for $90K worth of sales (I needed to hold back 10% for support equipments), and handed me literature that was by their own admission one year out of date and they promised the up-to-date literature would be sent anon. It never was.

      The result was no sale, the potential business never got off the ground, everyone went their different ways, and that was that. Here's where I address the first part. I tried to salvage something of my time by going with off-the-shelf PC hardware and software.

      There was maybe one Macintosh app of the time that could do anything useful and IIRC it was Electric Image. At the time, they wanted some ungodly amount of money that was a good 25%-50% above comparable Windows NT based offerings such as Lightwave and even SoftImage. The DEC Alphas of the time were faster than the Macs and they had SMP Alpha boxes availible which could really do some serious work (at that time). The Windows platform was the one to go with, but it couldn't touch SGI of course.

      Fast forward to today when Apple is selling SMP boxes every day, they have a really well put together BSD-ish/*nix-ish OS, paid supported software support, and are comparable to the Wintel side. The Wintel side can already do 64-bit, and there are boards which will take four dual-core 64-bit AMD chips. Makes the SGI base of yesteryear look like a calculator. With Apple going to Intel for their boards, a quad SMP dual-core board from Apple could be a reality fairly quickly.

      Apple was always the darling of the DTP mavens even when it lagged in power compared to Wintel and less expensive Wintel apps had more and better features than Photoshop. They nearly squandered that religious fervor altogether and if the OSX platform had been delayed any longer,

      --
      If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
  15. OpenGL? by rexguo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    SGI is the inventor and care taker of OpenGL. Without OpenGL, desktop 3D graphics would be completely monopolised by Microsoft's Direct3D. If SGI goes down, what's going to happen to OpenGL and the OpenGL Architecture Review Board that's responsible for advancing OpenGL?

    --
    www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
    1. Re:OpenGL? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      SGI's involvement in OpenGL in recent years is approaching non existant. Kurt Akeley, OpenGL's original creator has been at Microsoft Research for a while. David Blythe, another OpenGL leader from SGI, also at Microsoft. Mark Segal, one of the original OpenGL creators at SGI is at ATI I think though I'm not positive. Mark Kilgard, last I remember was at Nvidia.

      The companies keeping OpenGL alive are 3Dlabs, Nvidia and ATI and just about everyone but SGI. The only thing keeping OpenGL going is its all we have on Linux or any platform that is not Windows. DirectX has killed OpenGL on Windows which is 95% of the world, especially for games.

  16. Re:Shame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I have a nice little Indy.

    I've never seen an SGI box fail. I've seen IBM RS/6000 fail, DEC VAX fail, Sun SPARC fail, and Mac fail (although not the 68k macs!), but I've never seen an SGI die. DEC, SGI, and Apple are(/were) kings of good engineering. DEC's gone, SGI appears to be going, and Apple was saved by its iPod, thankfully.

    [rant]
    Why the hell don't people buy GOOD products, rather than just cheap or common ones (PC, sun, IBM)?? IBM and Sun arent bad, but PCs are mostly just commodity consumer crap. I would love to see more companies building reliable PCs, but, most non-techies don't understand the difference between one computer and another.
    [/rant]

    I hope SGI can pull an iPod out of its hat. 4Dwm and XFS are really good, although 4Dwm is sort of extinct. Maybe SGI can come out with an XFS solution for windows? Who knows. But then again, who would use XFS when they could use FAT32 unless they actually understood the difference? [more rant] How many PC/windows users know whether they're using FAT32 or NTFS? (Yeah, that's what I thoguht.) [/more rant]
    -os

  17. Cases by pr0nbot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    SGI has a proud history of innovation in graphics, microprocessors, operating systems, etc, but this post has to do with one other small part of that history... their cases.

    Well before the iMac, SGI always had instantly recognisable hardware. I wish there were PC case manufacturers with the same vision, who would churn out something stylish and interesting that doesn't look like an Air Jordan.

    My favourites: the Octane http://www.sgi.com/products/remarketed/octane/, and Tezro http://www.sgi.com/products/workstations/tezro/.

  18. Re:SUN IS NEXT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    For how long though ?

    How long until the markets that Sun desperately clings onto realise that they can do the same for a fraction of the cost.

    The days of expensive goofy looking hardware that doesn't perform are over. They were over about 8 years ago but no one told SGI apparently who's strategy have been all over the place.

    Actually I'm not trolling though, It is sad about SGI, they contributed a lot, they were 3D graphics in their time, and they set the tone for everything else that came in that field. But they just couldn't adapt to the way the market was heading and got left high and dry.

    SUN, well...the writing is on the wall isn't it. They will be watching their spiritual brother's final meltdown very closely and know they that they are next. Java isn't going to save Sun, they know the cold merciless hand of market forces is coming to them as well.

  19. Re:Shame by fm6 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Actually, the NT-based workstation that came out in 1999 was quite reasonably priced, compared to similar NT-based graphics workstations -- about $2K, if I remember correctly. A little high for most users, but pretty competitive compared to other serious graphics workstations -- including comparable Apple boxes.

    (Running NT may be uncool, but it doesn't mean the system is cheaply made or not powerful.)

    Unfortunately, they waited too long to get into the NT market. By 1999, other companies had it sewn up. So competitive price or not, they couldn't find the sales channels.

  20. Re:Itanium did them in? by turgid · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Yes, the whole point of itanic was to kill the 64-bit RISC market and to make intel the sole provider of high-end 64-bit processors. Lots of companies unfortunately drank the cool aid back in the '90s, and SGI was one. MIPS was an excellent architecture. The only ones to survive were UltraSPARC (Sun) and POWER (IBM).

    The other big mistake SGI made was when they took on Rocket Rick Belluzo (sp?) and he gave them a "Windows NT" strategy. In otherwords, a 10-year step backwards, and an attempt to sell over-priced 32-bit Pentium machines running Windows, where previously SGI had been selling 64-bit MIPS machines running UNIX.

    When the pointy-hairs get in charge of a company, it spells death.

    Sun will not be long for this world either. It is barely breaking even. Yes, Solaris 10 is superb and so are their Opteron servers and workstations, but the pointy-hairs are grinding the company down internally. The engineers are not longer free to innovate and work on the important stuff. They are given a constant diet of wild goose-chase projects which are ill-conceived and often cancelled upon completion, only to be give more with impossible deadlines and little, if any, thanks let alone financial reward.

    Sun will only hover around break-even by continually making more and more staff redundant to "cut costs."

    Sun can't market itself or its products to save itself (just look at it). The pointy-hairs keep changing company direction every three months. The engineers are over-worked, under-appreciated, under-rewarded and their opinions are not valued.

    Sun PHBs make ill-judged and groundless attacks on Free Software and Open Source almost monthly, they did a deal with Microsoft, they continue to deride Linux where it could have been a great benefit to them and their customers, they can't develop processors for toffee (look at how slow UltraSPARC is, and how expensive).

    Luckily Sun didn't do itanic, that's why it's not dead yet. Luckily they decided to go Opteron. Unluckily they left it a bit too late.

    Sun should Open Source Java (purely for the good publicity), make 24-, 48- and 72-way Opteron servers and write a software UltraSPARC emulator to run legacy SPARC code. Scott should fire Schwartz and Weinberg. Oh, and they should cease and desist all further UltraSPARC development. It's a complete waste of money. Just use Opterons. They're cheap and very fast and software emulator technology is good nowadays (and I thought that "everything is written in Java" too).

    This was the company that set most of the UNIX standards over the last 20 years and has given away more Open Source code than any other (including IBM, SGI, Red Hat,...)....

    --
    Stick Men
  21. CEO still gets $1m by Coward+Anonymous · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Makes you wonder why a company going down the tubes is paying its top executives a combined $2.7m.
    They are obviously dismal at their jobs and could have trimmed the company's losses by 12% if they were paid based on their performance.

  22. Why did this happen to SGI? by Thagg · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, there are any number of reasons, but I think that the biggest "problem" that they had was that the rest of the world moved at a faster pace than SGI was able to. SGI was used to four year or more product cycles, and Microsoft/Intel and the rest of the PC juggernaut moved twice that fast. That kind of failure builds exponentially over time.

    My first day at SGI in 1991 included the presentation to the company of what would become the Origin 3000 "brick", that would allow you to expand processors, memory, I/O by connecting boxes with thick cables. Unfortunately, I don't think that technology shipped until 1998 or so -- and you know that the engineers were working on it before 1991. Now, this was (and remains!) an amazing piece of technology (not in the Bruce Karsh sense) but anything that takes seven or eight years to produce is the wrong thing by the time it is finished. It has to be. Still, in the late 80's and early 90's, one could be forgiven for not noticing that the pace of change had increased.

    I was elated in '92 when SGI introduced the Indigo. Almost immediately, though, I was horrified to learn that it had "special" designed-to-be-incompatible memory modules. It was almost (but not quite) cheaper to buy memory by buying whole Indigoes and throwing the box away.

    I've always thought that it's not surprising when companies fail to adapt to change -- it's truly more surprising when they do.

    Anyway, we have our shrine to SGI still at Hammerhead -- a bookshelf full of O2's that we can't bring ourselves to part with.

    Thad Beier

    --
    I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.