Slashdot Mirror
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. "
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.
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.