Slashdot Mirror
SGI Warns That Bankruptcy Might Be Year-End Option
tbcpp writes "OS News reports: "SGI issued its most ominous regulatory filing to date, warning that a bad 2006 could force the former high-flyer into bankruptcy. In order to improve its business, SGI will consider measures ranging from axing or selling off product lines to pursuing 'a strategic partner or acquirer.' The hardware maker will basically look at anything and everything to remain a going concern.""
You mean they didn't already go bankrupt 5 years ago? I thought they were long gone!
Recently I was working on a project that involved an SGI server. It was initially just for simulation but it needed to render LADAR images and also show pretty graphics of planes flying over terrain.
When I got up to present it, I had made a video that captured the output through a capture device of the SGI box. It was a real pain in the ass to capture that in high quality but I did. One of the females in the audience (and it was a large audience) raised her hand and asked me why it looked like shit. I told her that it was because SGI servers concentrate on points of location--not really graphics. She balked at my explanation and kind of scoffed at me for not finding another alternative that sold better. She told me her son's PS2 rendered better graphics than that. I agreed though I said her son's PS2 wasn't concerned about exact locations and LADAR images.
What I'm trying to say is that they've been surpassed in quality.
Oh, and another thing, I had to get these LADAR images across the network onto a Windows machine that was running a webservice. Let me tell you that the support for NTFS and SAMBA servers on SGI servers is really not there anymore. I barely got something to work and that was pretty ganky.
My coworker (who is ten years older than I) told me that those purple boxes used to sell for ~$125k. Now, he says you can pick up the newer ones for around $25k. That's quite the drop in market dominance.
Goodbye SGI, I'm sorry things didn't work out better for you. You lost site of what kept you floating. In the long long ago, I hear tell you made the product. Today, that foothold has crumbled.
My work here is dung.
I never could get my Indys off ebay to work ... looks like I'm really goonna be SoL.
well that's bad news for someone. They should try and sue someone using their patent portfolio. That seems to be in vogue at the moment.
They backed the wrong horse (Itanium) and don't appear to have a Plan B. We have some nice parting gifts and the home version of The Silicon Valley Company Game.
SGI's heyday was when most people thought of them as The Purple Computer Company; the Jurassic Park Era. And yes, their lack of a brand identity and strategy was part of their undoing.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
And to think I nearly forked over the cash to buy one of the machines. They were just so damn sexy. I easily would have given up beer for a few months to pay for one.
I used to dream about these boxes. Of course whenever that wonderful experience came over me, the wife would wake me up for real sex.
Gawd.
This would be a real shame as SGI has talent for engineering great systems. The Altix is a really nice architecture, the idea being you start with a 4 CPU node and can scale to a very large system with a single system image, high availability, easy scalability of memory, cpu, storage and interconnect, and has nice management tools for partitioning, etc. Unfortunately the price of entry is a bit high, and I think that perhaps going with IA64 rather than the budding Opteron was a misstep at the time.
I also feel they lost a lot of momentum by dabbling in various unpopular markets like high end NT workstations, expensive specialty graphics workstations (given this was a core market for them earlier, but high power graphics became commoditized) and didn't really strongly launch into the linux server market and make a big presence in time. If they had pushed a cheaper starting system for a scalable single system box they may have done better, but who knows.
Everything dies
End of story
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
Dibs!
SGI, purple boxes is not as slick as apple's white theme, but you can still just design your high end gear on common intel chips and compete with apple on the expensive market, maybe the next high end users that migrated from linux to MAC OSX might migrate next to SGI? just a long shot here but worth a try ;)
Don't hate me; I just think that Sun has made some *questionable* decisions since I bought their stock :-(
The CB App. What's your 20?
Microsoft is about to make an aquisition.
who buys their IP, that is, the IP which isn't secretly pwn3d by Microsoft already. That is, if SGI has any IP that isn't secretly pwn3d by IBM already, either. SGI gave us whizbang graphics, spiffy NUMA stuff, and XFS (and more, let the list begin here). Some of the people there are obviously clever. Let IBM buy them for a song, and set up a skunkworks project somewhere.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Except Google.
:)
And Yahoo.
And SUN.
And HP.
And much of the drive of Cisco.
etc...
What a ludacris post. Must be a Cal grad...
I have heard it said of Microsoft that they have so many really smart people, and you don't see it in the products that they actually release to us normal humans. (I have even heard people who work there say it: they say they have really cool stuff in house, that somehow never gets out, or when it gets out, the cool has been removed.)
I'd be interested in hearing other examples of "really smart engineers working there but the results that outsiders see are mediocre". Amazon.com is another example that comes to mind (I used to work there).
I do not have an explanation for why this happens so often.
A counterexample: I worked at Apple in the early 90s and, given the amount of really dim or useless people we had there, we had really GREAT products.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple considers acquiring SGI. They certainly can afford it these days, and benefit from all the UNIX goodies that SGI has produced over the years.
I am not familiar with the history of Cisco.
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. (11072394) 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.
A question and a comment:
How will this affect Opengl or is it completely independent of SGI now?
I recently took an opengl class at SGI in Mountain View. The class and material was good but the desktop SGI machines were less than impressive. The final application I ended up with ran at 20 fps on the SGI machine and at 250 fps on my vanilla dell 2.5ghz pentium with intel integrated graphics. I mean come on, they are supposed to be the graphics dudes. I forget which SGI model it was but is was a weirdly shaped purple mini-tower (couldn't stack anything on top of it, thats for sure). If they hoped to ever sell anything to the classroom attendees then they shouldn't have given us something that made them look so bad.
Back during the .com bubble bust, I was looking to invest in a company with some of my RedHat stock money I'd made (post IPO). A coworker who had been dabbling in trading heard my question. He suggested I invest into SGI. I looked 'em up and they were somewhere around $10. Having just invested in a stock that I bought at $50 and sold at double the price, I wasn't too keen on buying such an inexpensive stock. He just shook his head knowingly and looked at me with a big smile and said:
"When there's blood in the streets, buy!"
So i finally got around to buying it at $12/share. That was its peak. I waited and waited, but only lost and lost. I sold most of it at something like $5/share.
Two lessons learned:
1) Some companies have more blood than you think they do.
2) I am not (nor was ever) a real stock trader.
To hear that SGI's only now announcing the possibility of bankruptcy tells me they had years worth of blood left...
(My friend never sold his stock and AFAIK still holds his shares!)
Two fish swim into a wall, one turns to the other and says, "Dam".
The fat lady isn't singing yet. She's not even backstage waiting for her cue.
That is because the Fat Lady took a job at NVidia.
Huge proprietary one-off systems, divisions that fight each other, a virtual pinball machine of executive changes, marketing that would make even DEC blush, it's no wonder why SGI is toying with Chapter 11. This after several years of trying to get themselves sold, is just so amusing.
I have a strong pity for people that thought SGI was a Silicon Valley progenitor and captain, only to find that it was really a dopey engineering company determined to constantly reinvent the wheel, never use anything anyone else did, and had the quintessential not-invented-here sickness that nearly killed Silicon Valley after co-inventing it.
It's my fervent hope that they just liquidate, and get it over with. My advice: skip Chapter 11 and go straight for seven, and put SGI and its employees (I've known many) out of its constant misery and pain.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I wonder if Google campus will be haunted by the ghost of SGI, the previous occupant.
SGI was my first non-government job, and my first time exposed to the Bay Area, back in the early 90's. SGI was just on a tear then, with Jurassic Park and virtual reality and so on, and it was a blast to work there. In fact, looking back, I'd say I was happier when I was at the office than when I wasn't. The people were brilliant, the products were dead sexy, and the environment was all about balance. For instance, while the group I worked in taught me a lot about what can be done with a polygon, they also introduced me to sumo wrestling (those padded costumes), windsurfing, motorcycle riding, a Grateful Dead concert (one of Jerry's last ones), and strip clubs (bachelor party for a team member).
If there's ever a funeral for SGI, I'd show up.
Didn't Cosmoworlds vanish into an I.P. black hole called Computer Associates? Maybe IRIX will do that -
If they'd had their dramatic culture shift towards Linux and back towards Openness only a year or two earlier, it would have made a big difference to them. Five years earlier, and they'd be dictating terms to the likes of Sun nowadays.
Too little, too late. Pity, much of their gear is excellent. I suppose it's too late now for AMD64s on a stick or some other Plan B which slashes manufacturing costs without destroying quality.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Movie makers who once used SGI now run Linux on HP servers.
They were responsible for the OpenGL spec itself, had a ton of influence on directions taken in the CG market generally, and instead sang endlessly about something called "Virtual Reality" while the rest of the world realised that unless it could be affordably domesticated, there would be no market for it. While NVIDIA and ATI said "Hey, mind if I check out this 'gaming' thing while you're out?" they were selling Caves with Dolby and a few O2's to CEOs of mining companies and a few UNI's once or twice a year.
I know, I worked in one. SGI reps would come over with "THE FUTURE" written all over their face even when we were openly replacing their boxes with white PC's running GeForce cards.
Snobbery or stupidity (they often converge), it is utterly their fault.
I mean, they have been circling for like 6 years now.
I have a friend there, he says the've lost money for 28 straight quarters. The layoffs they do EVERY quarter don't exactly help morale, either.
They're a premium brand, and USED to have cool stuff. They got passed in the graphics business, their bet on Itanium turned out to be a turkey, and the government isn't buying SGI stuff like they used to -- they used to have some nice hookups there.
Turn out the lights, the party's over.
All the off world contacts and the Ori? Oh SG-I- not SG-1- ... Nevermind...
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
SGI's MIPS once ruled 64-bit computing (along with Alpha). Somehow all changed when Belluzzo convinced them to become yet-another-wintel dealer; and Intel bluffed them into giving up their technical expetise with Itanium vaporware.
You kinda feel sorry for them - but this has been a long long time coming. Funny thing is that people call Itanium a failure; while in really it's key in helping Intel take 64-bit leadership away from MIPS & Alpha -- and Belluzzo got a president job at microsoft rummored to be largely because of his role in killing the microsoft competitors of SGI as its CEO and crippling the non-wintel parts of HP in his exc management role there.
...on their wicked cool logo!
SGI gave us whizbang graphics, spiffy NUMA stuff, and XFS (and more, let the list begin here). Some of the people there are obviously clever.
Don't forget the Standard Template Library.
Might wanna download all the docs before the bankruptcy court pulls the plug on the servers.
Just somebody please pick up the rights to OpenGL and make it Free.
Anyone interested in forming an OpenGL foundation?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
This can all be remedied with $10 worth of spray paint and a decal.
SGI has been living in a bygone era. They literally are the modern mainframe.
Once upon a time, SGI sat in the drivers seat for providing services and software to an eager market. Instead, they relied on selling outrageously over-priced proprietary hardware while their competitors chiselled away at their market by selling toys that eventually were more sophisticated than anything SGI could offer.
And what about the software? 3rd parties have all swooped in and developed 3D graphics suites. So SGI is effectively cutoff from the Sega escape, become a software only company.
SGI is now in "startup" mode. They have to find a new business. I don't know why anyone would want to buy SGI. It has no consumer level brand recognition. The kind of people who buy high end workstations are immune from the stickers on the cases.
Best case, somebody comes in and buys the rights to brand their Graphics cards as SGI. The rest of SGI is relegated to a service shop for the dwindling number of SGI users.
Linux/Intel is the future of high end rendering.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
What ever happened to SGiTunes? Aren't they making bucket fulls of cash? Or is that some other high flyer?
Am I the only one who read that as SG1 at first glance? :P
We all though Apple was dead and out too. And now look at them. It sounds like it is house cleaning time and a change of direction. The OpenGL standard is nice but really out dated. If a company created a real time ray tracer (RTRT) they could pomel the raster graphics erra. But this is just my opinion.
Soon Going Insolvent....
They backed the wrong horse (Itanium) and don't appear to have a Plan B.
Linux killed SGI, not Itanium. I've always argued that Linux is a far greater threat to traditional unix vendors. like Sun and SGI, than to Microsoft. Sun and SGI sold many systems to users who did not really need anything Sun or SGI specific. For some they just needed a generic unix box and a PC running Linux was a whole hell of a lot cheaper than a Sun. With PC graphics cards getting decent 3D hardware, some found a PC running Linux was a whole hell of a lot cheaper than SGI. I saw this at school where PCs replaced Suns unless you could state a need for something Sun specific, few did. I saw similar things in the chemical industry with PC doing day-to-day visualization and modeling, Sun and SGI boxes became rare.
Back to the school example, ironically, the switch from Sun to PC/Linux was also a win for Microsoft. Somewhere along the line they decided to have the PCs dual boot.
Interestingly, recently I've seen a slight shift away from Linux towards Mac OS X. Apple is doing some good outreach to unix developers, academics, etc.
Must be a Cal grad...
Yup.. and apparently you didn't graduate at all.
It's amazing how quickly people forget. Ricky "Microsoft Mole" Belluzzo is the reason SGI got it's head-shot to begin with. Remember Rick? Yeah, he was the guy who, while working at HP back in the mid-90's, made the announcement that HP would be "dumping HPUX in favor of Windows NT" without any warning or approval, forcing HP to do the world's larged backpedal ever seen.
He then went to sabotage SGI with the SAME STUPID GAMBIT, before finally going "home" to Microsoft.
I knew SGI was going to tank as soon as they dumped the very cool, 3D geometrical logo for that retarded lower-case "sgi". Especially given the importance of brand image to their business. Was there *anybody* in the boardroom with a clue the day that decision was made?
SGI will certainly be around for a while, though probably with fewer employees and products. Of course, they're already way past being an important player in the marketplace.
Copyright © 1994
Hewlett-Packard Company
?
Okay, genius, how about Decru or VMWare? Those acquisitions averaged half a billion dollars each; Decru was last year AFAIK and VMWare was about four years ago. Also, Mike Farmwald was a Purdue professor, not a Stanford professor.
You're just jealous, must be a Cal grad, or worse, one of those Big 10 grads who hitchhikes into Silicon Valley looking to make it big. Also your naive view that the only stakeholders who matter are the common stockholders is funny, if not annoying. Just be glad they let you buy a ticket to ride.
With great power comes great fan noise.
lack of forceful "no. don't touch" from smart management
That was one of the most interesting posts evar (or at least today).
(And to think I let my last two mod points go to something I don't even remember. Maybe they lapsed. See, I don't remember.)
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Afterall, the Cell processors will be using a newer memory called XDRAM I believe, which is licensed and owned by the same RAMBUS group (and will have a theoretical bandwidth of 60 GB/s). Don't light the funeral pyre just yet!
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
SGI *was* cool. How many of you has actually help the company by really *buying* some stuff from them?
Apple *was* cool and *is* cool. I, like many many many of you, own an iPod.
I'll take the bug, you can have the goofy stylized "sgi" one.
Everything dies, baby that's a fact.
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
-- Springsteen, "Atlantic City"
They already sold their entire patent portfolio to Microsoft several years ago (1998?) for ~$60M in an attempt to stay alive. Very sad.
I heard a while ago that their largest source of income comes from Google, whose current Mountain View campus is actually owned by SGI, and was their former HQ. In other news, I was said to see Alias|Wavefront go to Autodesk a while back... Always thought Maya w/ SGI was a good match.
I hope someone picks up IRIX or that it's made open source. I've been working with UNIX/Linux for about 16 yrs and have been an official SA for about 9. I gotta tell ya, IRIX is really nice. I like the way it handles devices - scsiha/ioconfig/hinv is real nice - and the partitioner, fx. Their installation progam, inst, is not bad either but could use a better network automated installer. Overall, I think it was ahead of it's time, but could have been improved on. I guess they switched focus to Linux(SUSE) instead. I feel if someone picks it up, say IBM, they could make some real cool improvements.
As far as I understand it, it seems the Standard Implementation is licensed under a BSD, mozilla alike license
s e.html
http://www.sgi.com/products/software/opengl/licen
For the record, the parent is right. Anyone who makes investment decisions based on the dollar price of stocks should be asking for a refund on their lobotomy, as there was obviously too much removed.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
Apple used to be on the verge of death as well, but Steve Jobs made the smart move of makeing the "i" series of products. The 'iMac' and the 'iPod" saved Apple and made it the powerhouse it is today.
Using that same lowercase "i", SGI needs to create the following products:
iRIX -- a new "internet" version of their operating system. Based on Unix and with a slick looking GUI, it should be named after various breeds of Dogs.
iNDIGO -- A candy-colored all-in-one box, preferably purple, that glows while it's on, pulsates while downloading data from the network and runs absolutely silently.
iNDY -- A smaller version of the sam box. Maybe plays MP3s.
This series of moves should save them from death...
TTYL
Brian C.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Silicon **GRAPHICS** Inc.
Yeah - GRAPHICS.
They made a pretty OK server thingy - with a UNIX kinda thing - and they were black and purple with sexy blue lights...but in the end, the only thing that was truly, utterly, unique was blindingly fast realtime 3D graphics.
The very day the 3Dfx Voodoo and the TNT and their ilk appeared, you could get fast-ish 3D for $300 instead of $500,000. You just can't sustain a market in that environment. SGI's hardware was quite a bit better than the PC cards of the day - but not enough better to keep enough of their market share. That was the defining moment - from that point, SGI were doomed. The day we started to see hardware transform and lighting in the GeForce-256 card - SGI died. The corpse is still cooling off - but it's been dead for quite a while.
What they should have done was to see the writing on the wall and become nVidia.
They had the super-intelligent graphics engineers (who saw the writing on the wall and now work for nVidia) - and they had the name - and at the time, they had the money to fund the research. nVidia wouldn't exist now if SGI had switched gears in time.
But they kept thinking that somehow there would be still be a high end market - and there never was.
nVidia *is* SGI.
www.sjbaker.org
This is bankruptcy! I know this!
The funny thing is that SGI was never know for robustness of its hardware (IBM was better) but those old servers must now be 10 years old and they are still chugging along.
No more funding, so i guess they are gonna shutdown the Stargate.
Maybe they aren't taking in cash hand over fist like they used to, but SGI still holds some serious patents that are being used by Nvidia, ATI, and other major players. I doubt they will go the SCO route and start suing everyone, but don't be surprised if there is a bidding war over this particular bloated corpse.
SGI'ers know what I'm talking about...
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Oh well!
:D
They have been dead a while anyway. Or at least been reduced to a random Linux on Intel platform. Only spectacular thing about their machines now are the cases.
Irix is a really nice and ellegant OS. Its by far the best Unix Ive ever worked with. So why, oh why couldnt they just polish the GUI a bit and rewrite some network stuff to make it follow the time! It doesnt help to be a couple of years ahead of your time when that time is over ten years ago.
If they go out of buisness, at least it would mean that maybe the Tezro's would become cheap enough for us mortals!
When in danger, whewn in doubt! Run in circles, scream and shout!
I'm a big SGI fan. One of the first "real" computers I ever used was a SGI Indigo.
:o
It's kind of shocking that they haven't found a way to leverage the huge brand recognition they have amoung the graphics geeks out there. Notice that slashdot still uses the old logo? That's the old SGI that has the brand recognition. The one run by engineers. I don't know what SGI does now - live of of legacy defense contracts? Remember they were first with that beautful, wide-aspect LCD?
SGI broke my heart the way HP did. HP used to make the best scopes, the best function generators, the best calculators. No compromises, for engineers, by engineers. Now they make plastic, disposable, mass produced, "me too", junk. SGI went from being a company on the edge to getting demolished by cheap commodity hardware - they lost sight of what made them special IMHO.
SGI should make a high-end x86 workstation that doesn't suck, and work on things like OpenGL based software APIs do to things the next generation of software and scientific apps are going to need. Things like vision recognition, 3D world building, massive 3D simulations. Work with nvidia or ATI to make some new, exotic cards. Push hard on not just full rates and shaders, but raw computational geometry - pushing millions of verticies around.
No vision, no company, no SGI. Maybe Apple can buy them and make a SGIpod.
..don't panic
1. tell customers and investors that your company will crash unless they buy truckloads of your kit.
2. ???
3. Profit??
No one will buy kit from a company that is going down.
They are history - bet they wont make the year end.
No, no it doesn't.
-- Anonymous Coward, "Slashdot"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/01/sgi_moves_ bishop/
"SGI's transition away from MIPS and IRIX to Linux on Itanium has proved disastrous."
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Idiots should have got into the GFX card market.
Uh... people who worked for SGI DID. It ain't their fault that management's a bunch of asshats.
Where the smegging hell do you think ATI and NVidia got their talent, hmmmmmmm?
I once did a fellow ship with these guys in 00 and was really impressed with their product. I was at the main campus that one day in April when the CEO gathered all of the employees into the cafeteria just off the yellow brick road and told the employees exactly how much trouble they were in when their stock completely tanked. It is really sad considering some of their hardware (Onyx and Origin) were not only innovative, but kick a$$ as well. Hopefully someone will pick them up. I would like to see Sun gobble these guys up and take control of their machines!
The next Isuzu Vehicross. Nope, it didn't get watered down. There just was no market for it.
Or maybe (given the two seatedness) the next Suzuki X-90, Buick Reatta, Chevy SSR or (2000-era) Ford Thunderbird.
You assume "it would have sold like hotcakes". But that really means that you liked it and perhaps some others too. But that doesn't mean that in its impractical form it would have sold well or even outsold the resulting watered-down product.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I can't find a license under that link but I do know that the licence for GLX "SGI FREE SOFTWARE LICENCE B" has ben deemed non-free by debian http://bugs.debian.org/211765
What, in god's name, are they going to "sell off"?
Oh, the Itanium servers? Yeah, the soaring Itanium-server market - I bet investors are already beating a path to their doorstep to be part of the Itanium Eco-system.
Pitty for SGI, but it seems it's over now.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
See "Lost In Space" The Movie, to see what I'm talking about. SGI got a plug in the film as co-funding the trip the Robinsons were taking. D'oH!
I guess that's like the PAN-AM logo on the Shuttle in Kubrick's 2001.
Or the ATARI logo in Blade Runner.
Hrmm. The one thing you should not put in a Sci-Fi film is an existing corporate logo... Seems to be the kiss of death.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
SGI will be exhibiting at SCALE 4x on Feb 11th and 12th 2006. In addition there will be a workshop on ODF in Government on Friday Feb 10th.
a GeForce Ultra 5600 with 128 megs
of non-shared RAM.
SGI is a solid brand. Expensive, but solid... My last job we had one of 'dem Onyx machines, this thing was loaded, 26 processors 8 gigs of RAM 4 graphics pipes. Oh yeah, this thing screamed. We used it to drive a flight simulator. Like someone mentioned, they should pair it down and get into the high-end desktop environment and compute with Alienware, etc.
My work here is dung.
Ludacris?
You fucking imbecile.
There were a lot of ideas to survive: ;) ) Maybe team up with AMD or IBM, whatever...
Why not make a graphics card for ordinary, plain, common PCs? Imagine the geek-factor of "Hey - I have an SGI-Card inside my box!" along with a sticker on the case. Everybody would want one...
Or manufacture high-end-PCs for graphic-intensive tasks (such as gaming...
They missed 1001 things/opportunities/plans/ideas and are now going R.I.P. - it's a pity!
Ice
Sig? Where I go, I don't need
My work here is dung.
There are so many icons within SGi's horrid past, that it needs to die. It's cancerous. It's stupid. It's hateful, it's small.
And it's now, hopefully gone. I love it when companies threaten CH 11. It's so like a guy pointing a pistol at his head, saying if I don't get a handout soon, I'm going to kill myself. Instead, he's killing the vendors, the stockholders, and most of his good friends off.
Michael Woods, in his great book on SGi, should put an addendum to it, on how the mighty have not only fallen, but passed awful gas for years on the way down.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
As i come from an engineering background, i'd say that there are a few measure they coyld follow in order to increase their market presence and cash coming in.... 1) They should 'sell' theri brand, that's a VERY HUGE asset they've got! 2) Partner with a TFT monitor make and sell 19+ TFT monitors with the SGI brand.... 3) Partner with a keyboards and mouse maker and produce SGI workastation grade mice and keyboards!!!! That will keep them not in the market but could turn to be a major success.....
I was wondering about that... Dammit, I'm a fool. I saw the lack of moderation, and the brainfart just continued. 0wn3d!
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
Do you mean a Tezro (http://www.sgi.com/products/workstations/tezro/) with "the industry-leading VPro V12 graphics"...
Just think, SGI could have been the leader in PC 3D graphics.
keywords "SGI Free Software License B"
the license text is here
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/FreeB/
in ps and msword
the important stuff seems to be in sections 2.x
No, no one would want SGI's revenue with SGI's expenses and SGI's debt. $66M cash, $300M debt, book value per share -0.94, return on assets -12%, profit margin -15.37%. Dude, your company is going down in flames. Very sad, I was an IRIX admin and even had Indigo2 as home computer until 2 years ago, but SGI lost its leadership a long time ago in the mid 90's.
Here's one thing that could save their ass:
Make graphics cards. Ones that Real People can afford, with open hardware specs. They control most of the IP which prevents everyone else doing so.
Either that, or SGI can just quietly fade out of existence and let scavengers like MS buy out that IP, ensuring nobody will ever use it again for anything but DirectX.
1. The Cray aguisition
The whole company focused on the highend and integrating Cray's technology and took it's eye off the low end commodity market.
2. Windows NT 3.5.1
The first version of NT that was stable and made the developers of scientific and CAD apps and universities (SGI's bread and butter) to take Microsoft seriouslly.
3. Ego and denial
Tom Jermoluk and Ed McCracken refused to admit there was a 500lb pink elephant in the middle of the board room with Intel and Microsoft logos tatooed on it's ass. Jim Clark didn't, but he lost a power struggle with McCracken and went AWOL until he resurfaced with Netscape. By the time SGI decided to build Wintel boxes, it was too late.
4. The Internet boom
SGI's heyday pre-dated the 'net boom and when the boom hit their talent pool was drained by startups such as nVidia.
5. Re-inventing the wheel
Few of SGI's products ever "evolved". Once they completed rev. 1, they threw it into the market and went completely back to the drawing board to reinvent something brand new instead of evolving (and supporting) existing products.
6. Developing for the sexy, not the practical
SGI's products were sexy and they demoed great but the reality was that the flashy capabilities targeted the small, niche markets like entertainment while they ignored more practical (but un-sexy) features which made them more valuable in larger markets such as CAD.
7. Horribly late in bringing products to market
The O2 and Octane workwstations, as well as their last decent graphics card, were 1.5 - 2 yrs late in coming to market. By the time they were announced they weren't competitive and comprimises had to be made to shoehorn the latest processors from MIPS into them. And the O2's graphics were hardwired to the motherboard and couldn't be upgraded. And as detailed in #6, they were loaded with features that demoed well but almost nobody used (e.g. Octane's crossbar bus technology). And then McCracken handed development of the Wintel box off to the same group that screwed up the O2 and the made the exact same mistakes again.
8. No clue on Wintel
As mentioned above, the group that developed the O2 was handed the keys to develop SGI's first Wintel offering and they made the exact same mistakes. Horribly late to market, loaded with features few people used, and with graphics that were hardwired to the motherboard and couldn't be upgraded. They even went as far as to build a custom BIOS incompatible with existing BIOS-based tools such as Ghost. When sys admins evaluated the boxes, they said "wait a minute.... I can't use my existing admin tools with this thing.... forget it."
9. Fahrenheit
Just as John Carmack had given OpenGL the shot in the arm it needed and it was gaining incredible momentum against Direct3D, SGI made a deal with the devil to merge OpenGL and Direct3D. Fahrenheit never saw the light of day, OpenGL lost it's momentum, SGI's CEO got a high paying gig at Microsoft, and OpenGL is going to be a second class citizen in Vista. SGI also gave up it's efforts on scenegraph and large model APIs which would've differentiated OpenGL even further.
*sigh* so sad
The time I spent working for SGI was one of the most rewarding experiences in my career.
got repost it so i can get at least some credit.. predictions
We're looking at SAN solutions, and so far SGI's was moving to the head of the pack because it is the only one we've found (so far) that offers "official" support for OS X Servers. There are articles about "making EMC work" on the Mac, but no official support. Obviously, the boss isn't going to let me do a six-figure storage project that we don't have total support for from the vendor...
Hope they survive, or I'm going to end up stuck with no SAN and instead dangling a dollar-equivalent amount of storage off of a bunch of different systems, instead of one neat, manageable, versatile pool.
Who did what now?
. . . . in my caffeine-starved stupor, I thought the headline said, "SCO Warns That Bankruptcy Might Be Year-End Option" and felt a brief sense of elation. . . .
I figured SGI was long gone already.
When I read over dismal financial news from SGI, or another less than stellar earnings report from SUN, or even the nefarious schemes of SCO, I think about the huge missed opportunities with Linux primarily.
Many of these companies could have adopted Linux in the period ending 1998-2000 when Linux had no strong commercial supporters and quickly led the new charge.
Merely being a figurehead but supporting Linux on x86 actively, and marketing low cost, quality commodity boxes would have been enough to put these companies on a strong financial footing.
Talk about business missteps!
I wish they would open source PointBlank, or even offer it for sale. They could make a little money from that. I remember playing that in the SGI lab we had in college. It was a ton of fun, and much better than BZFlag.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
According to this report SGI spends more than 50000 dollars every weekend to fly its CEO around the country to play Golf. That could explain the bankruptcy. I wonder why the bankruptcy laws dont require the entire board of directors and CXO grade of officers to be forced into personal bankruptcy when their company goes bust. Right now the way bankruptcy laws are structured its profitable for CEO,CFO ,CTO etc to actually loot the company, run it into the ground and then apply for bankruptcy and use that as an excuse to loot the pension fund.
**Life is too short to be serious**
I work on a government installation. SGI has been used at our site on the HPC side and in the visualization department. The SGI machines, whether they be the 3800/3900 series (MIPS based) or the Altix series (Itanium based), have been great machines. They run the benchmarks well, and are popular with users. They are not necessarily the fastest machines (either MIPS or Altix), but there is more to it than just pure raw speed. Certain HPC machines run some benchmarks faster, but are a dog on other types of code. SGI's claim to fame is graphics (which they lost), shared memory (which they are losing), Single System Image (SSI), and NUMAlink. On the graphics side, there InfiniteReality4 (IR4) graphics pipes have 1 GB of memory available on it. The IR4 pipe ($100K) is over 4 years old now, and NVidia is rumored to be finally bringing out a similar piece in April for $8K. Of course, NVidia's and ATI have long surpassed the IR series for speed. Because of that, in 2001 we switched from SGI workstations to Wintel/Linux workstations. SGI has known this for quite some time, which is why they switched to using ATI workstation cards in their visualization machines. On the shared memory side, they are close to losing it as well. The best workstation today can physically handle 128 GB of memory. When SGI bid for our business, they proposed a Altix for several hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were then told that we could buy a workstation for less than $80K that could perform as well as what they were offerring. They were crestfallen when they found out what their competition could do. SGI has since made a better offer, and may yet win the business. On the SSI/NUMAlink side, they are still ahead of the competition. Really the shared memory, SSI, and NUMAlink are all tied together closely. SGI makes a nice acquisition target. The joke around the HPC community is that Cray will buy them. (SGI bought Cray, took the good items, then sold it back off. Cray is doing well now.) Why is SGI in its current position? 1. They lost focus in the Dot Com era, and have been struggling to to gain it back. Said another way, they had poor management. 2. They were squeezed from below by Wintel/Linux workstations. 3. They were squeezed from below by the Linux Cluster. 4. There is not enough money in the HPC world to support SGI, IBM, HP, Compaq, Cray, and Sun. Compaq was bought by HP. SGI will be bought by ??? SGI does have good talent. I personally know some of the engineers. Theoretically, SGI can survive. They just have to execute correctly (no more delays on the dual-core Itanium). The Altix is a good system. They have good government support contracts. Do I think that they will survive? Well, they have lasted longer than I thought they would. I expected them to die in 2001. Personally, I think that they will be bought by IBM (for the defense contracts) or HP (for the Itanium). But as you can see, I have been wrong for the past four years.
Why dont Apple buy them? God they could do some very cool stuff then, and have nice high-end xserves, and make OSX a good OS for servers, which IMO it isnt yet.
All the patents covering OpenGL are owned by Microsoft. They were sold by SGI some years ago.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
They didn't sell the entire portfolio. Just everything valuable. :(
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
You mean SGI is still in business?
I believe that because you did not address the Register's sensationalism, you agree with my first point.
Does SGI have the ability to come in line with revenue to become a healthy company? That is the question. The focus of your statement was on the current company performance, implying there is no future because of the past. Perhaps you've heard the warning that "past performance is not an indication of future gains."
I extoll the vitures of a company that can turn around. Will they? We'll see. SGI is certainly not the same company we knew and your nostalgia about IRIX isn't relevant because new SGI customers are buying (essentially) Linux on Itanium for high performance computing because they do offer value. Go to the web site and look at the press releases and see if simple math makes SGI returning to health impossible.
Like everything in life, it is a matter of execution and time. Thanks for your response.
My opinions are my own, but you may share them!
At least SGI is not pulling a scox. SGI could probably hang on for a few more years if they were to go after msft fud money to file some bogus lawsuits.
I don't think SGI has ever lied about their prospects. I'm surprised they managed to hang on this long.
In the Linux/FreeBSD era, I don't think any UNIX pure-play can thrive.
I find your idea that a commodity operating system killed a high-end hardware vendor intruiging ...
It's quite simple really, I'm not sure why you are having a hard time following it, but then again AC's are easily confused. Many Sun desktop customers did not need high end hardware. They just needed a decent unix box, they need the software not the hardware. When Linux became a viable alternative they ditched the expensive high end hardware they did not really want in the first place. So yes, a commodity OS can kill a high end hardware vendor.
Like compaq and DEC . .
Hi, this is Jerry. Just letting you know, we still think you're gay.
I worked a simulator project that was based on SGI/Irix once. One of the software guys got the Linux bug and started experimenting. We put a Dell P4 dual processor running Linux up against an SGI O2 MIPS processor running Irix. Best options we could find on both, both running the same code compiled natively. The Dell beat the SGI box about three to one on performance, and about 6 to 1 on cost ($6000 vs $40000). It came out to 20:1 over all price-performance gain.
The customer was already highly invested in SGI, so we had to continue in that direction, but the development team started seriously investigating Linux clusters as SGI replacements from that point forward.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
OMG what a shining example of hack journalism.
"THE MOST OMINOUS FILING TO DATE". Run for the hills!
But hang on -- is it really anything new?
The exact same disclaimer appears, word for word, in the
10K and 10Q filings from:
22-Sep-2005: http://biz.yahoo.com/e/050922/sgid.ob10-k.html
9-Nov-2005: http://biz.yahoo.com/e/051109/sgid.ob10-q.html
4-May-2005: http://biz.yahoo.com/e/050504/sgid.ob10-q.html
Let's watch. Will THE REGISTER post a retraction for this
false alarm?
Was it called the "Homer"?
If there are any stockholders left ,they will be the ones who take it in the end! Failing execs still get their multi-million dollars bonuses. Who has been punished really punished for Enron,WorldCom and others?
SGI has been broken ever since McCracken, addled by Hollywood illusions and his hubristic lust for more power and spotlight, ended up on the "Information Superhighway Task Force", and started jerking off in Washington instead of paying attention to SGI's bottom line business way back when in 1994/1995.
;)
All of the stupidity that's choked them since is an outgrowth of those critical, faltering missteps in 1994-5... Spending countless acres of cash on real estate and buildings when renting or buying old and retrofitting would've been less expensive.. not revising those real-estate plans when sales were not meeting expectations and tailoring appropriately.. total lack of focus on quality of product.. it's the same story that's being played out at Sun even now as we speak.
On top of that, I knew SGI employees who'd outright steal hardware for personal use and enrichment via grey/black market sales.. not little things, either.. noo, no, no.. big things... like whole hunks of parts of Origin 2000 boxes.. Crimsons, Indys by the half-dozen. Never, in 15+ years in the valley, have I seen a company with poorer inventory control and security than SGI..
Don't even get me started on that fucked up travesty of a logo, either.
If you're going to sell the Ferrari of servers, you need panache and style.. a Ferrari of logos... not three stupid type-written letters.
Think "brown ring of quality".
As far as I'm concerned, someone please pull the freaking plug. Persistent vegetative corporations supported exclusively by government handouts^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontracts are a freaking pox in this country.