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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.""
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.
Their competitors were smart enough to patent their own research, and then cross-licence the technology. They tried a lawsuit against Nvidia which was settled through cross licensing. 3dfx tried a lawsuit with Nvida, ran out of money, and ended up being bought up. If SGI tried any funny business now, they would end up like 3dfx.
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.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
SGI didn't switch to Itanium until they no longer had the money to keep MIPS competitve. For years SGI machines have been used almost exclusively for scientific work, which Itanium is great for. They probably would've been better off dropping MIPS sooner.
SGI's problem is they only want to sell really high end systems. They want the high margin, low volume products. The problem is as PCs eat their marketshare, they compensate by focusing on even higher end products. I've talked with their salesmen about the issue, and they're actually rather proud of their business model. They absolutely refuse to consider lower margin, higher volume products. Looks like they're determined to stick with the business model until it the end.
Yep. I have to agree with that. Instead of continuing Mips R10/12k development and continuing with IRIX, Belluzzo told all the engineers taht Mips and IRIX were dead... before there was anythign to switch to! I could hear the resumes being updated even as he spoke.
SGI's greatest asset was its amazing engineers. Many strategies would have been possible for a management team that understood the power of the people SGI has in their engineering organization. Belluzzo was a commodity, cookie cutter guy. He couldn't create his way out of a paper bag. Good riddance.
Steve, a former SGI system software developer