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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.""
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.
But their stock performance was very, very mediocre, and I wondered why so many smart people could do things that don't shine in terms of corporate results.
In the late 1980s I saw the same thing happen with a Hyundai. Motoring magazines reported on a really nice sporty little car they'd prototyped. It was really cute two door, a unique looking convertible that would have sold like hotcakes. Then as it got closer & closer to release it gained full rear seats instead of being a 2+2 layout. Then it got a bigger trunk for more luggage, a fatter roofline for more rear-seat passenger room. The "radical" front styling was softened, then it was given another two doors. In the end it was just another small four door hyundai, and when released was received so poorly it never made it out of Asia.
A press statement from Hyundai stated something along the lines of "market anticipation failed to convert to sales" when it was canned. That's because the beancounters, the conservative marketers massages the product into something virtually the antithesis of the original product the market built up its anticipation about.
Seems a common theme in the big companies, where something good is created but because of a lack of forceful "no. don't touch" from smart management everyone gets to poke their fingers in and change things, making Yet Another Lowest Common Denominator Product.
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.