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SGI Faces Another Reorganization
dewey writes "This article [from Yahoo! News] says that SGI is expected to announce another business restructuring next Tuesday. No details about the reorg yet, but the buzz is that the focus will be away from big customers buying high-end machines and more toward being better able to 'compete on the Web' -- whatever that means." Update: It may mean more Linux support; jho sent in a link to the new SGI Linux page. A ray of hope in SGI's otherwise gloomy future, perhaps?
Two questions:
What's the non-linear editing software like, and how does one find a copy of it?
How do you find a reasonably affordable 100mbps Ethernet card for an Indigo2? I thought most of them were $ 800 plus.
D
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What is your experience with reliability of SGI harware?
I worked for a computer animation company that had 4 SGI boxes (one Indigo2, one O2 and two Octanes). In the nine month I worked there. The Indigo2 needed its graphics card and CPU replaced and one of the Octanes needed a CPU replacement. The Indigo also blew a hard drive, but I can hardly blame SGI for that.
After that I have felt rather sceptical to SGI workstation hardware. Although I will admit that when they did work, they kicked ass.
Jamie,
Your O2 is safe, at least I see no 'end of life' for it in the foreseeable future. Bug fixes and improvements come with continued IRIX 6.5 releases and I think the hardware can be upgraded to an R12K.
I think SGI already dipped in the PC graphics market years ago - well before anyone else. Unfortunately, I think they were too far ahead of the field at that time. There was little or no PC graphics industry and their openGL PC board was ditched (maybe never really released).
The potential NVidia 'partnership' factor is interesting though.
I think we're all best waiting until next week rather than speculating on what they plan. I'd agree that SGI have made many mistakes - but, hey, hind-sight is 20/20!
You have to be patient. Check out a company called Phobos. It's basically a PC NIC, but in an EISA format for the SGI. Most cost $695.
Don't forget Samba, too.
SGI has been dipping it's toes in open software for more than a year now - not including the times open software has been incorporated into IRIX in the past (ie tcsh and top). Learning open software development practices has been an ongoing process at SGI - IRIX 6.5's maintenance process has a remarkable resemblance to those of several open source projects. They're also doing quite a bit to establish SGI as a valued member of the community by making contributions to the open source base. SGI is one of the few vendors who have realized that open source projects are community efforts and success depends on having the recognition and support of the existing community.
Note that effort to have Linux running well on the visual workstations have been redoubled, it looks like Fahrenheit was canned, and the new
Intel based low-end server is being pushed with more emphasis on Linux than on NT. Maybe a unix vendor found it hard to work with folks from Seattle. What a shocker!
Unlike the other major vendors that are hopping onto the open source train, SGI still has some remainder of the freewheeling, motivated by coolness factor and pride in achievement (that has to be flagrantly displayed) corporate culture that made them a leader in the first half of the decade. The same motivations that drive open source. The 'g' stands for geeks, maybe?
Another interesting thought is that while IRIX is certainly one of the most advanced OS's around, the only reason it exists is that SGI wants to sell hardware, but needs to have an OS that will actually take advantage of it. All that really takes is being able to contribute a few key pieces. They are bound to IRIX until another OS has it's capabilities but don't feel like waiting for a potential option to catch up - especially when they might make money supporting it now.
...I want to see them die. Sorry to say that, but a company that dumps IRIX for this incredible primitive, overhyped OS deserves a quick and painless death.
...I want to see them die. Sorry to say that, but a company that dumps IRIX for this incredible primitive, overhyped OS deserves a quick and painless death. I bet that many people in the industry feel the same way.
"On this end, there are those of us who like running Alias (Maya), Lightwave, and Softimage: apps which don't run on SGI's ersatz competition." Huh? Lightwave, Softimage, Maya, and Studio(formerly Poweranimator) are ALL available under NT. And the rendering performance of Maya on a $4000 P2 box runs circles around a R10000 O2 box. Your argument is something out of 1995. Mips hardware is simply too expensive when compared to the price/performance ratio of NT boxes. I would LOVE to see these applications ported to an SGI Visual Workstation Linux box.
Is this /.? Or bad-attitude?
There's definately a move to put more diverse products into the market at SGI. And they've put good stuff out the door, but haven't been able to sell it in the volume necessary to pull a decent margin.
So how about 10) A bunch of people who played marketing experts on an Indy Cam find themselves unemployed on Tuesday and end up at Microsoft. A few years later, Linus achieves global domination. Even better, the engineers bought off by NetApp are revealed to have been working for satanic.org, a super-secret operations group of the ILUG. Netapp falls to (Linux MIPS based) Cobalt, and the penguin government purchases large numbers of big Onyx3's to model plans for paving Canada in realtime 3D. Said marketing experts are branded with a g and are exiled to Seattle without umbrellas.
Now is that b-a or g-a?
SGI dumped future MIPS work a few months ago; after spinning it out to a new company last year or so. So, yes, SGI is fucked. They're going to be, as JWZ said, just another VA in a few years -- b/c now SGI is populated with suits whose thinking goes: "innovative research? whoop-ass silicon? Too confusing for me... let's just see what everyone else is doing." Full of fools who think success can be found by following behind leaders in an industry. Most particularly that new CEO they have -- IIRC, he came to SGI after nearly sinking HP under the 'let's dump all our existing r&d in favor of Windows and Intel' strategy||seppuku. (I was amused -- damn near the day HP lost/dumped him, they came out with press statements like 'Hey! What's this HP/UX thing over here?! That looks pretty cool!') etc...
One would think that anything that SGI GPLs will be credited to them, and creditors might justifiably claim it was a fire-sale move and get the technology transfer declared illegal.
That's a really good point I hadn't considered.
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DNA just wants to be free...
>And you know, Sun can't build graphics
>hardware or software to save their life.
>Never have.
Uh, have you ever seen the numbers on the Elite3D boards from Sun? They have about 4X raw polygon performance of SGI's Solid Impact graphics, and twice the ProCDRS benchmark results. Yes that includes the Octane SI/SSI/SE/SSE which are all interations of the Inidgo2's Impact graphics. Sun's boards cannot do the texture mapping that the SGI High Impact/Maximum Impact/MXI/MXE graphics can do, but since about 90% of all workstation graphics requirements are for solid modelling, Sun does quite well in graphics. Hell, even the Creator3D graphics board with NO hardware accelleration beats the Octane SE in solid modelling. And a Sun Ultra10 with Creator3D costs about half of what a R12K O2 costs, and a 2x450 MHz Ultra 60 with Elite3Dm6 graphics costs about 75% of what an 2x300 MHz Octane/SSE costs.
> It's sad to see that some people think
> that Sun is actually competition to SGI.
Sun IS competion to SGI. That is why Sun sold more workstations over the last 12 months than ever in the history of the company (and more servers, too). What is sad is to see how SGI can't keep up with the market in graphics. What is also sad is that SGI forces you into a VW 540 if you need the performance of the Xeon CPU, but only need one or two of them (very common in the Wintel world). What is sad is that SGI continues to sell the O2, which costs significantly less than the VW to manufacture, at an exhorbitant price ($7,499). What is sad is that SGI still offers a 17" monitor as standard with the O2. What is sad is that SGI chose the QED rm5200 CPU instead of the QED rm7000 CPU as the next CPU for the O2 (they are pin and instruction set compatible with each other). What is sad is that SGI is a visionless, rudderless company that has forgotten where it came from, and has no idea where it is going.
If you want to see innovation in the 3D, hardware accellerated, texture-mapped graphics, go to http://www.intense3d.com. Intergraph's Intense3D division is now the undisputed leader in workstation graphics technology. But buy the machine from Dell, not Intergraph, and you will get a better deal.
One BUYS the software. You know, it's commercial...
And many aren't. I work at a DOE lab, and we definitely do not buy enough SGIs to make their consumer business insignificant by comparison. Also keep in mind that the NSA has their own chip fab facilities, and those fables acres of underground computers are probably not made by SGI.
I agree with the person who said SGI should extend into the consumer graphics hardware business. I can only imagine how fast Diamond Mm et al. would fall to the might of SGI hardware.
*You* can't build an SGI system. That's the point. You are buying into SGI's expertise (in server-land) for things like fast buses, CC NUMA, scalability etc. This is the future - potentially. If SGI manage to get openGL running accelerated/optimised on their 320/540, that's another reason to prefer an SGI over one of your PC's.
It is open source and well maintained ;
http://www.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU/~gam3/knfsd/
I don't know what you mean by that last sentence.
Not only do I want references to the 'forward looking' analysts, but wonder why I'd trust them.
Maybe you work for Sun?
You ended with 'Sticks and Stones may break my bones but FUD will never concern me' but are guilty of spreading FUD yourself.
SGI have never announced the death of IRIX/MIPS. As long as MIPS competes, then IRIX will be around. What appears to be in doubt is the port of IRIX to IA64 - but even this is rumour and hearsay.
To a degree, it doesn't make sense to spend LOTS of money porting IRIX to Intel. If they're building Intel systems, it makes business sense to use Linux.
STOP SPREADING FUD
Yes, I do remember that roadmap. It very clearly delinated IRIX as living on IA-64 (Merced), and MIPS for quite some time to come.
NT was still at the low-end of the division, and was in no way replacing IRIX.
MIPS was the only part of the equation set to 'go away.'
And I just can't understand anyone who is "rankled" by this. Am I the only one with any sort of vendor loyalty who just doesn't care about NT?
Suffice to say, it's moot anyway. The big plan now is to add Linux to their roadmap, while IRIX remains on MIPS through R14000 and posisbly the R16000.
In my opinion, that would be suicide. SGI are not cut out to be 'graphics board' manufacturers. They build complete systems.
Nonsense. Anyone who has used IRIX knows how horrible it is at multi-tasking (I recall compiling on an O2 or an Octane and witnessing other processes grind to a halt) and other functionality that we take for granted under other operating
WTF?!
...if only it were that simple. I'd be willing to bet that it's more like this: 1. Management decides it wants NT. 2. OS People say, "Okay, NT makes sense for the new low-end target market. IRIX still lives supreme in the high-end." 3. Management decides it also wants Linux. 4. Some OS People say, "Are you nuts? A 3 OS strategy is untenable from a managerial perspective." Other OS People say, "Linux is obviously the wave of the future, let's ride it too." 5. Bitter in-fighting ensues in the OS groups, resulting in a number of engineers leaving. 6. As a 'resolution', and at management's hands, it is decided that SGI will leverage IRIX technologies by incorporating them into Linux (XFS, scheduler, lots of other good stuff.) 7. The OS engineers who know anything about how an advanced OS like IRIX actually works realize that any such integration would be like starting IRIX over... from scratch. Linux is just too primitive; it will probably take years before anything capable of utilizing SGI's high-end hardware could be developed. But management wants it all, now. OS engineers who have a clue leave; most are bought wholesale by NetApp. 8. A bunch of not-necessarily-clueful engineers remain. Numerous calls to NetApp are logged. 9. SGI is left, more-or-less, without sufficient IRIX or Linux engineering prowess. 10. (insert prognostications here...)
Absolutely! Gee whiz, SGI is gung ho on Linux. Compared to SGI, Sun looks unflatteringly like another Microsoft.
Jeg hører dig, broder.
For fear of repeating what everyone is saying:
NT sucks, Linux sucks, Intel sucks.
When you pay for SGI, you'd better get MIPS and IRIX and at least a 21" display.
I've had my Indigo2 for quite some time, and I've never had *any* trouble with it. A friend of mine has three; an Indy, and Indigo and an O2, also without any problems...
but if Roblimo's description is accurate, I don't think much of the approach. With SGI's NT efforts having a relatively poor reception, I would think they'd want to emphasize supercomputers and high-end workstations and servers as their core strengths.
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Correct Link There was a ' instead of a ?
As callous as this sounds, I do hope they manage to get a good amount of their IRIX tech into Linux before they go belly-up. I doubt their creditors would be as free with it.
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DNA just wants to be free...
They've been dying for over a year now and forward-looking analysts wrote them off two years ago. Going into the linux market is simply silly for a high-margin manufacturer.
I would have to agree. The high-end graphics systems are where it's at for SGI as they've really made their market there and have been able to dominate successfully. Maybe they see cheap distributed computing as a nail in their coffin and want to go on to something that would mean selling more units at lower cost. Still, there's a lot more competition in that market.
ian.
ian
Sgi is in a tough position, with the viruals workstations"ill reception" Intergraph made the movement from unix to NT YEARS ago, I see it as a mixed bag, with sgi tryin to fit into a niche that does not exist like it once did, Lets hope they can intergrate technology, we can all benefit.\
One thing worth pondering, in the light of the serious period companies with commercial Unices like HP and SGI are now facing, is wether the success of Linux is what's killing the companies. People don't have to go for a big bucks system anymore like a decade ago. They can throw Linux on a PII system for pennies on the dollar.
Linux certainly has changed the Unix market. It might even have hastened the death of Unix (as a viable commercial platform).
I just don't get it. How can companies such as SGI and HP bank on Intel chips for their future servers? Without control over such a key piece of technology, these companies will have little to distinguish themselves from the competition.
Regardless of what one thinks about Microsoft or Intel, it is now clear that Sun made the right decision to not embrace their technologies as Sun's core future direction. Intel and Microsoft look out for their own interests not anyone else's, and they are large enough to not really care whether an SGI or HP eventually gets squashed. What the heck is the future of being simply a reseller when at any time Microsoft or Intel can allow others to compete with the same technology, and when your rate of innovation to the customer is limited by Intel and Microsoft's timetables. Look at the delays for Merced and Windows 2000.
Shame really - SGI have some really sweet technology. Been rather letdown by management lately it seems. I know some people who are kinda traditional buyers of high-end (ie Origin 2000s) SGI kit and they aren't too impressed with SGI's moves recently.
If SGI are going to drop/lose/sell some of their high-end stuff, I wonder who's going to buy... Sun bought the physical design for the Starfire about 3 years ago for $100M. Now they're making about as much revenue off the Starfire (including attached storage and services) as SGI are making in total...
Check out this C|Net article for more information
It describes how SGI is laying off and transferring a bunch of the Advanced System Division engineers. ASD is the heart and soul of SGI, and has been for a decade. It will be interesting to see what they say next Tuesday, but their actions are pretty revealing. Many engineers are being transfered to NVidia...recall that SGI reached some sort of deal with NVidia in the last couple of weeks about intellectual property.
The article says that the changes are designed to help their more profitable Intel workstations instead of their older Mips-based machines. Now, this of course flies in the face of reality, that the Intel machines lost a ton of money, but the Mips machines made enough that the entire company turned a profit. Of course, reality is a crutch for those who are not cut out to be Marketing Managers.
The article also confirms that the Fahrenheit initiative is being cut back. This is tremendously good news. Fahrenheit was supposed to be a follow-on to OpenGL, Inventor, and Performer -- it is a joint venture with Microsoft. I cannot imagine any input that Microsoft could have on OpenGL to make it better; even without the wretched example of Direct3D. If Fahrenheit was just a bone thrown to Microsoft to distract them from attacking OpenGL -- as it appears to me -- then I give SGI a lot of credit.
In articles a month or so ago, the announcement of the reorganization was going to happen today, the 5th, instead of the 10th. Their stockholder meeting, which used to be in August when I worked there, is now Oct. 27th.
Read the above article mentioned C|Net article, it's chock full of good information.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
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Please use the new logo, it's for you!
I just don't thing SGI gets it, people want speckled, granite-looking cool cases on their workstations. What's the story on this charcoal and blue two-tone thing? I'd bet money on it -- SGI, bring out some Indy-looking workstations and folks will buy. Heck, run CP/M on them, all we want is a cool-looking workstation. C'mon!
There's a huge installed base of Irix customers that won't be migrating to Wintel architecture just because it's the new thing - the high end gear will remain on MIPS for the forseeable future, and that's where Irix will remain. Linux makes absolute sense - give it the features they need to make it compatible with Irix and use it on Wintel. In the process, be a cool company by adding to Linux.
their pain.
But, on the other side, SGI has always had one
thing on its side: fan-fsking-tastic hardware.
And when the OS is the same, and the platform
is the same, what matters? Hardware. So maybe
they have a chance in the server market. If they
have fun with stupidly high bandwidth busses and
don't get greedy with the prices, they may do alright.
But for God's sake man, LEAVE THE HIGH END MARKET
AS IS! The world needs at least one vender doing
what SGI's doing. Sheesh.
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Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
You can generally get:
3COM 597 TX Controller
10/100 Base T Ethernet
Drivers available free on web
www.phobos.com
ftp://ftp.phobos.com/drivers/SGI/
For roughly $200
The $800 US Phobos G160 Fast Ethernet boards attach to the Indigo2's proprietary GIO64 bus which has much higher bandwidth than the EISA bus.
Unfortunately, this card wasn't much faster than the built-in 10BaseT Ethernet with the drivers available for IRIX 6.2. A very depressing realization considering that the card costs more than eight times that of a PC 10/100BaseT card. I just started upgrading to IRIX 6.5.4 and it looks like performance has improved quite a bit.
"Yeah well
Not only do I want references to the 'forward looking' analysts, but wonder why I'd trust them. Go to yahoo finance page on sgi. Look at the analysts upgrade downgrade rankings. Its basically all at "hold" - which in this bullish market isn't good. Maybe you work for Sun? Nope, nor any other sgi competitor.
Quite true. It's worth noting, however, that most ultra high-end rendering and such (SGI's former bread and butter) is now being done on networks of smaller machines (as I recall, most of Toy Story was designed on SGIs and then rendered on several racks of headless Sun workstations). SGIs seem useful when you need something bigger than a Sparc-based or x86-based system but smaller than a server farm. That's not a real big market (you either need graphics or you don't). The larger issue is whether SGI gets you more bang for the buck than some other solution, and the answer increasingly seems to be "no". Yeah, you can do more with one box than you can on any other computer (with the possible exception of the big Suns), but when it's possible to easily cluster computers, is that particularly useful?
No biggie on the spellcheck. The guy you were responding to spells definitely the new ignorant/geek way -- "definately." Someone notify Websters
Consigned to flames of woe.
> Why should I spend $3200 on a linux box from them? I could build a system myself for a lot > cheaper. You can't build a SGI Intel system, that's why. Take a look at the specs. SGI designed their own custom chipset that interfaces directly to the CPU. They do NOT use commodity motherboards! What they are aiming for is quite literally the fastest Intel systems in existence. > Now if I was buying a MIPS R12k system $3200 is definately worth it for IRIX and the speed. Nah, go Alpha 21264. :)
[ sorry about the above post, damn HTML formatting that is now apparently the default for Slashdot ]
:)
> Why should I spend $3200 on a linux box from them? I could build a system myself for a lot
> cheaper.
You can't build a SGI Intel system, that's why. Take a look at the specs. SGI designed their own custom chipset that interfaces directly to the CPU. They do NOT use commodity motherboards!
What they are aiming for is quite literally the fastest Intel systems in existence.
> Now if I was buying a MIPS R12k system $3200 is definately worth it for IRIX and the speed.
Nah, go Alpha 21264.
...IF they could rqapidly expand their support of Linux. There are a lot of indy's and other machines that could really look impressive with a quality accelerated server, not to mention the new visual workstations. This company was built on removing hardware bottlenecks, and kickass video technology--even a 4 yr. old indy with a mid-level card makes any of dell's machines look sad when it comes to imaging. Most technology companies go through frequent restructuring as they reach for the gold ring. DOS 4 was a bummer for Microsoft, but they appear to have recovered from it (hah). I think they aren't really sure about the whole Linux gig. I mean, two years+ to get an Xserver for the Indy? From the "Graphics Technology" company? Arrgh. If I had to guess at a strategy, I'd stick with what they are best at -- removal of PC bottlenecks and superior graphics capability. Massive scalibility of low cost/high speed machines. Make your money off quantity. Standard form factors, cool cases, incredible speed and graphics at a cost marginally higher than dell/compaq/yoMomma pc's. Thay broke into the unix market with their own flavor of unix, at a cost lower than their competitors. Now the trick is to do something similar with PC's. But why is there ultra high performance OGL graphics for NT and IRIX, but not Linux???
The company suits decide "The world is moving to NT. We must move to NT."
The techs, of course, respond with "Oh god no." So they push Linux as an alternate hot, emergent technology -- one that doesn't suck.
The best parts of Irix technology can be moved into Linux, they can still make awesome hardware, the company does well, and everybody's happy.
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IBM, Compaq (Digital), HP, Sun.... what's the grief in losing SGI?
The last major problem AFAIK is Linux's scalability to 4 proc and up. And we all know that this is a priority within the kernel bunch right now. By the time Linux 3.0 rolls around, we may have a very serious kernel on our hands.
--Lenny
Why should I spend $3200 on a linux box from them? I could build a system myself for a lot cheaper. Now if I was buying a MIPS R12k system $3200 is definately worth it for IRIX and the speed.
look sgi should _not_ try to out-sun sun or out-ibm ibm. they have great technology in an area that could represent high growth in the next 5-10 years. they should move into consumer video cards and propogate technology through set-top and otherlike markets. don't be a follower, be a leader!!!
p.s. the linux strategy is really nice however...
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Their project list on http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ lists the following ongoing projects:
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The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
The Power Indigo2 (R10K/195) is a formiddable machine even by today's standards. The nearest competitor is a higher end Octane MXI - which the Indigo2's served as a pre-cursor. Of course the Octane wins with it's switched crossbar, but still...
Remember, these machines are VERY highly tuned for OpenGL and 3D graphics. They were used to make Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park... For good reason.
I'm not saying they're current to today's technology though, in many respects. They have Fast-SCSI and 10-Base-T builtin. I already upgraded mine to 100-Base-T. I doubt I'll do much with the SCSI. I'll use the Sun with the MultiPack RAID in the corner instead. ;>
I love my Indigo2, and you'll have to pry it out of my cold dead fingers before I give it up.
If the NT line disappeared tomorrow, it would affect SGI not one bit, rest assured.
The only way you can beat that system for 3D graphics performance is to spend $2000+ on a high-end graphics card such as the Intergraph Wildcard 4105. Of course you still have to buy a well configured PC to stick that card in. As far as 2D graphics goes the SGI VW 320/540 is unbeatable. Check out the review at Lumis3D.
If you're not doing highend 2D/3D graphics then don't buy the SGI VW320.
Admittedly, if you needed to do graphics work on the 320 today, you'd have to run WinNT, but it looks like SGI is committed to making Linux do 3D graphics well, in the very near future. There's gonna be some serious Linux goings on at SI99RAPH
"Yeah well
for years they were the cream of the crop in servers and high speed workstations. Intel was never a match for them, but now with the PII/III and Xeon chips, Intel has found a way into the high-end computing market. I don't think SGI euipped itself to deal with this. They embraced Intel with the Visual Workstations, which are great pieces of hardware, but are too expensive for some, and can be seen as entering their dotage as even faster bus speeds are reached with non-SGI chipsets, 3.6 gig memory bandwidth isn't as fast as it was a year ago. It's good that they've embraced OSS because they've done some really great things that it would be nice to have open sourced but I think it's the beginning of the end of SGI unless they come up with the next Big Thing before someone else does.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
At first when I read this and especially the rumor
that they are "downsizing" the team working on
a replacement for Infinite Reality graphics (now 4 years old) I thought that's it, the end for sgi.
-
But maybe now the whole thing makes sense. SGI had already lost a whole bunch of their hotshot
graphics engineers to Nvidia. So now they give the rest of their graphics engineers to Nvidia and outsource future graphics pipe development to them. Arguably, SGI hasn't been able to compete on graphics chip development for several years now anyway.
But their's one thing that noone else can do like them: Massive internal bandwidth. So they concentrate on developing radical new bus architectures and massive scalability (their core strength) and leave cpu development to intel (merced) and graphics chip development to Nvidia. SGI's almost certainly getting royalities from Nvidia anyway now that the patent swap thing has happened.
Not such a bad plan really.
"Compete on the web" means "compete with Sun"... Sun successfully made the transition from gfx workstation vendor (ok, so we *really* used sparcs for mudding at GA Tech, but I'm told they were marketed for graphics work) to a network server vendor for ISPs and such... SGI also tried that, but poorly enough that most people didn't know (last I heard) that that's where SGI got most of its money. Perhaps they intend to make another run at that market--the movie and video game industries are large, but not large enough to make SGI big $$$.
Bus, bus, bus.
There's your reason. But, really, if you can build your own computer, why don't you just go and do it instead of whining about not being able to afford an SGI prebuilt and warrantied for you?
Personally, I dislike building computers from scratch. But you don't see me whining about how much more I'd spend if only someone would do it for me, do you?
I really hope they get their act together, find the right direction and make it happen. Otherwise, they might face a similar fate like Digital, who also had great technology (Alpha chip) but no direction, and is now going down together with Compaq.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.