Silicon Graphics To Be Delisted From NYSE

Dan Linder writes "Starting Monday, November 7th, Silicon Graphics will be delisted from the NYSE. The future of the graphics and supercomputing former-heavyweight has never been less certain. This is especially unfortunate given their ongoing commitment to Linux and other open-source projects." From the article: "The company's stock, which once traded at $50 per share, fell below NYSE's minimum standard for continued listing earlier this year. The move comes as little surprise. The company received a warning from the NYSE in May, when its share price dropped below the $1 barrier. Although it had dipped into sub-$1 territory in late 2001 and again in late 2002, the price on both occasions recovered within a month or two. "

Comments

Too ahead of it's time?

[d00ber]

SGI put out some increadibly cool technologies:

OpenGL - a very important 3D API

The Standard Template Library

VRML which gave rise to X3D Open Inventor which is a C++ wrapper around OpenGL.

Pretty purple boxen that were great in their day.

It seems that these came out years before the average user could really leverage them - years before anyone (including SGI it seems) knew what to do with them.

It seems a shame that such a brilliant company could have such a hard time making money. They made the world a better place though, IMHO.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[Shinobi]

The Linux kernel reaches 128 CPU's just because of SGI. So, it's not as easy as you think. Also, there's the hardware to consider. Opterons aren't up to 32 yet, they are hoping that the new 3rd-party chipset will work well with that

The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[Darius Jedburgh]

...incompetence ever told. It's astonishing that a company that made the best computers in the world for 3D graphics can have fared so badly in a world where even your cell phone is a computer supporting 3D graphics. They had the world handed to them on a plate and they simply threw their hands in the air, the plate with it. Astonishing. And so depressing. I'd really ike to try to understand how the likes of nvidia took the laurel from them. I remember nvidia's very first '3D' card (you probably never saw it, I helped develop drivers for it many many years ago). It was the biggest pile of crap ever developed. Never in a million years would I guess that a few years later these guys would be blowing away SGI and hiring half of their staff.

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[lmlloyd]

You are certainly right about the level of incompetence, but in some ways it even goes beyond incompetence, to what almost seemed like a willful destruction of the company by Richard E. Belluzzo. During his tenure at the helm of SGI, they made several decisions that doomed the company to ultimate failure. The first and foremost being that Silicon Graphics would change its name to SGI, stop focusing on graphics, and focus on internet and database servers. The next suicidal decision was that SGI would dump a lot of money into porting their flagship software graphics software (Maya) to Windows. The most crippling blow was that since they were no longer focusing on graphics, they would actively lobby a PC card manufacturer (Nvidia) to hire their engineering staff, and sell them their IP. Then they decided that they would abandon their own OS, and instead make components of their OS available to the Open Source community and put out machines with Linux and Windows. By the time SGI workstations were just PCs running Windows, using Nvidia graphics cards, it was clear the company was dead.

Of course, after making all these ruinous decisions, Belluzzo immediately quit to take a job at Microsoft. I have never been able to figure out if his job at MS was his reward for scuttling SGI, or if after what he did at SGI, MS was the only company that would hire him! Either way, it was SGI itself (under Belluzzo's leadership) that opened the door for Microsoft to walk into the high-end 3D market. Before Maya was ported to Windows, and before Nvidia came out with their Quadro cards, the idea of doing film-quality animation on a PC (while possible) was not taken seriously by anyone in the industry. 90% of the production tools were SGI-only programs written for Irix.

All in all, I think the market is probably better for it, since now you can buy a $100 motherboard using SGI's crossbar architecture (now called the Nvidia Hypertransport), and $300 graphics cards using SGI graphics processors, instead of having to shell out $10,000 for a workstation. None the less, it is a coffin SGI made for itself.

Re:What do they have going for them?

[TheRaven64]

A few years back, a group of SGI employees approached the management with the idea of a graphics chip that could be made cheaply enough to be sold for gaming and low-end CAD-type things for going in PCs. It would be slower than the rest of the SGI products, but `good enough' for a lot of their potential customers.

Management decided not to pursue this - they didn't want to cannibalise their workstation sales. The employees shrugged, left, and set up a new company of their own - you may have heard of it, it is called nVidia.

The moral of this story? Never avoid creating a market just to avoid destroying your existing market. If you do, then you will find that you have a competitor who wasn't even in your original market.