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SGI CEO Belluzzo Resigns
dpreformer writes "Belluzzo has resigned and Bob Bishop is now acting head of SGI. We copuld probably all see this coming with the recent news of SGI spinning off its NT workstation and Cray divisions. Morale at SGI must be pretty low about now. 1500 layoffs, another couple of thousand working for spinoffs." A lot of good engineers over there, ya gotta hope things can be sorted out soon.
Firstly, the CEO sees the books...ALL of the books. If he chose to leave, you know that there is more bad news ahead.
when the captain abandons ship, its a bad sign.
Secondly, its nice that SGI is donating some code to linux, but that doesn't mean that you have to moderate up every piece of two-bit analysis that frankly paints a highly unrealistic picture of a seriously troubled company somehow reclaiming glory.
The chances of SGI staging a major comeback at this point are quite slim.
Their linux strategy frankly is quite weak - they're going up against very small and nimble opponents (VA, Penguin COmputing) that don't have their high expenses or morale problems (their competitors are growing).
I don't see SGI edging out VA in the near term.
Anyway, lets get a reality check on the moderation of flakey "feel good" posts.
The NT and the Linux strategy are stupid. SGI should focus on what they've excelled with in the past. Clue: it wasn't open-sores charity ware. And it wasn't congealed-sores Redmond-ware.
...they have been showing a "Java on NT" course. No mention of Linux, of course.
m1cr0S0f7 0wn$ j00
Could it be they're salvaging good people from a company so desparate that they're grasping at freeware?
I don't know who, maybe IBM, but they aren't going to make it alone, its as simple as that.
The only problem with that theory is that it misses the obvious fact that all Microsoft had to do to kill the proprietary Unix vendors was come out with an engineering workstation platform that is superior for the volume business (lower-end CAD, simulation, etc.). MS didn't have to do anything to directly impact the workstation market. Look back as the engineering journals of a few years ago. They all knew the big empire of mega-workstations was dying. What will be left is Sun, in a few niche markets like internet infrastructure. For awhile longer.
> Anyone care to chime in with their suggestions as to what SGI needs to do to right the ship?
:P
:) it sounds like they need someone with some vision to put them back on course.
Hire Steve Jobs? Worked for Apple
I don't know a lot about SGI, but from reading the comments here (always an unbiased source of information
Sponge
bull crap.
that is ridiculous.
If software vendors are not "allowed" to sell their products for linux by you liquid-brained, basement-lurking linux monkeys, your little operating system will go down and fast.
give me a break already.
If it ain't free, it ain't worth anything. /usr/local/etc/app.conf then I don't want to use it.
If it ain't open sourced in which I could make the default config file A:\doze.ini instead of
It is us basement lurker that Microsoft has a stronghold even in the bootleg market.
If you want to survive in the post capitalist market, you cannot charge money for it or else you just end up with more of that paper stuff in which people could set you on fire with.
a.) Please, please check your grammar.
b.) Linux (and linux software) is only free if your time is worthless.
c.) I have many friends in the high-end industries using high-end costly workstations and high end costly software (that's right, they paid dollars for it) "surviving" just fine. Thriving, in fact.
Use it every day. But I'll never, ever understand why they never made a MIPS ATX motherboard for the masses.
Proprietary hardware, proprietary upgrade path.
Oh yes, did I mention still no Xserver for Indys after hmmmmm...two years? From the "Industry Leading Graphics Company"? And during that time they dutifully licked the jackboots of Billgatus and gleefully gave him an OGL/NT platform that screams? Still no Linux for O2's?
Still no accelerated OGL for Linux on anything. That's some Linux strategy ya got there, SGI.
I have a default 2, so it's all my fault :-(.
SGI has a lot of problems, but I think reports of their demise are exaggerated.
The former CEO bet his chairmanship on the NT workstations. I see him leaving as a positive move - they know NT hasn't worked, and they have to pick another strategy.
D
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SGI has a pretty long history of making stupid decisions. I think they've lost focus of the fact that they're a computer graphics company and not a general everything to everyone type of company.
High End Computer Graphics are rapidly becomming the domain of Joe LUser's desktop. I think SGI is having a hard time coping with that, much in the same way Digital had a hard time coping with the desktop induced demise of the Mainframe.
So, unless SGI can re-invent their nitch, I'd say that thir outlook isn't very rosy. I mean, you can only expect education, holywood and the defense industry to provide passing support for a nitch company. SGI's chance to change and evolve pass them by several years ago.
I used to work for the company that renamed them. I swear to God, they probably charged about $1 000 000 to recommend that Silicon Graphics International to change their name to SGI. Oh well, at least they didn't go with "Computa".
who wrote those cool games for the Apple II like Dung Beetles?
He probably got forced out by the Board of Directors -- they can do that, remember. This last guy bet on Intel/NT. After seeing how well that went over, he probably got forced out, with some stipulations that he not talk about the details of his resignation/removal, lest the board unleash his secrets, and he never work in industry again. it happens. Many resignation letters have been written up and presented to the unlucky individual, who is 'encouraged' to sign. Happens often, actually. Firing isn't the best way to do things all the time.
What if they merged with Apple? They're both pretty big in the graphics industry. Or are they just *too* different?
Good time to buy SGI stock if you ask me. :)
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
"He currently serves as a member of the Industry Advisory Commission as well as the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Governors of the World Economic Forum for Information Technologies."
It's funny, it seems from reading comp.sys.sgi.admin and comp.sys.sgi.misc that the SGI employees (at least the vocal ones) are still fairly happy about the way things are going at SGI.. I have a few friends internally there, and they apparently are still drinking the Kool-Aid as well.
I just hope things work out for them in the long run.. it'd be sad to see another Cool UNIX Company (tm) like NeXT go down the tubes.
-s
---- noi non potemo aver perfetta vita senza amici -- Dante
I asked before and I ask again: Why do companies ally themselves with either Intel or Microsoft? The one Unix company that had little to do with either, Sun, is the one doing the best. (Well there's IBM but they're so huge they're able to do everything at once...) It's not that Intel or Microsoft are inherently evil, it's just that they're extremely good at looking out for their own interests and only their own interests. It is perhaps impossible for a large company to form a successful alliance with either. Intel and Microsoft in their own interests would prefer their technology to be distributed by several competitors, so how can an ally find a high profit margin niche? In the long run I don't think it can be done. I find it tragic that a misguided executive such as Belluzzo would be allowed to damage or even destroy not just one but two companies, HP and SGI, in pursuit of his faulty vision.
SGI had already decided to make partnerships with Intel and Microsoft before McCracken was ousted and replaced by Belluzzo. It was Belluzzo's job to announce the decisions to the world, and to try to work with those commitments as best he could. -- An anonymous former SGI employee
It's always a bit rough during a major change like this, but SGI now seems to have a consistent vision and strategy that is actually quite viable (http://pmitros.mit.edu/sgistrat). Give them a couple of years, and they'll be bigger and better than ever.
Now is the time to reverse some of the evil, useless and stupid changes wrought upon the company for no good reason...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Did you realize that there have been more stories about SGI on Slashdot over the last few months than there have been on Sun?
For all the company has gone through, there is an incredibly loyal base of people who want to buy their Next Cool Thing (and I number myself among them).
All they need to do is product a good workstation that runs some kind of Unix (Irix or Linux, their pick [*]), sell it at a reasonable price (say about the same price point as the VWS), and the customers will come running back.
If they can just get their management problems under control, I see a bright future. It's kinda like Apple - they have too many customers who love their products for them to fail. Their mistake in embracing NT was to disappoint those customers.
D
[*] Irix might be preferable; if Linux, include ports of their Alias|Wavefront packages so we have something to run on the shiny new machine.
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The mid range gfx group is also being canned. Many of them are moving to NVidia, though not all. Recently, the last manager left the group. The Buzz chip (now two years late) is still scheduled to come out though one may entertain doubts...
Given enough management changes, someone will eventually get in there who thinks free software will send SGI rocketing to the poorhouse and nix the plan to Open Source it.
Oh yea, their stock will be back at 48 before long. SGI got rid of their CPU engineers last year, and this year they've done the same with their graphics engineers. They made hay while the sun shone, but now they're headed for oblivion.
Forget Linux, forget Intel. People who're too cheap to buy a decent OS usually aren't interested in a graphics workstation either.
SGI, don't underestimate your customers.
AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!! D-DD_dd-d--aasmm,n! That new jolt cola packs a punch.
You weedhead ! Bankruptcy with 700million$ in cash ??? Economics wasn't really your thing at college ?
Dave, thanks for updating your "Buying an
:)
SGI system FAQ" recently!
Your page sent me on my twisted and tourtured
way!
If Linux ports of Alias|Wavefront packages are important to you (and you would actually *buy* them if they were available) you should definitely let A|W know. They have already ported the batch render for Maya to Linux, and this year at SIGGRAPH they made it clear that they are considering porting much bigger chunks of code *if* their customers express sufficient interest. They actually had a couple of engineers at the Linux/OpenGL meeting who were interested in talking with other people considering porting big applications, so it seems like they are willing to go there.
Some market capitalizations to ponder:
RHAT: $4.269BSGI: $2.348B
Anybody think that Red Hat is really worth almost twice SGI?
Why'd you say 'burma'?
Why'd you say 'burma'?
--I panicked.
processor bound. Have you at least tried
make -j to parallelize the compilation?
They can't do much about making the CPU itself
faster, just getting rid of the bottlenecks
around it.
--
Insanity Takes Its Toll. Please Have Exact Change
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
feel bad for the people at SGI, first that stupid logo now this. SGI has had a really hard time in the past few years. Way back when they were the cream of the crop in just about every sandbox they played in. Now they have to borrow everyone else's toys because they dont think theirs are good enough. I think one of the biggest problems for them was the maturation of the IA-32 into something that was truely enterprise class. Three years ago the Pentium Pro was king shit over at Intel, it failed miserably in comparison to the MIPS or UltraSPARCs of the day. But then the Pentium II and such upper class chips started coming out and Windows because a real power player in the workstation market, not because of it's great quality or power but because it was a might cheaper than an O. People use what they can afford, especially small businesses who don't need to render the universe for fun. This means Wintel is in and SGI and DEC are out. DEC just died and will probably never be revived. SGI came under their "new management" and started with their damnable NT Workstations. This may have been nice but they completely abandoned what they did well, which was very high end Unix workstations and servers. The NT workstations SGI was selling were supposed to catch your eye with the brand spany new SGI logo, catch enough of your eye you didnt see the incredible price tag. Sorry Dell and Compaq are already solid in the wintel workstation business. SGI has been getting out niched and now don't know what to do about it. They should probably look to Apple and Sun for inspiration. Instead of tryingto do whats already been done, do something new and useful. While Sun hasn't done too much that can be considered new, they've really worked hard on their packaging, offering complete solutions for just about all sizes of business which is doing well for them. Apple completely reevaluated itself and went through a rebirth. They really kicked off and drove the cheap, feature laden home PC. SGI needs to get back into the server and workstation game. Do something really spectacular using the technology they've been using. Not try to compete with wintel gients like Dell and Compaq. I personally would like to see a new MIPS based design maybe even something that can use off the shelf hardware so they can supply the processors and motherboards but dont always have to supply the periphrial hardware which has a much lower return than the processor and such.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The nt strategy was stupid - the Linux strategy makes a lot of sense. Whenever SGI would show their new PC, folks would say, uh,that's cool, but how about a Linux version of that box? SGI finally saw the light and dumped nt, and they may become a major Linux player in addition to maintaining their high end niche with their Origin servers. The explosive growth of VA Linux systems and Penguin computing show that Linux users want high quality hardware on which to run their OS.
Maybe it's just a touch of the looking-back blues or something, that they want to get rid of the prat who lead them down the NT path for a bit? :)
New direction (linux), new ceo bod, oops must get rid of old one first?
'Tis a shame to see SGI looking like heading down the pan though...
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Just a little thing to add a twist to the tail but if you look at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/990824-000007.html
where there is a nice little story where it says that Belluzzo might become the head of M$ Internet Division
An SGI programmer asked me if we were hiring while we were at Linuxworld. Apparently it's gotten so bad that people would rather work for us than SGI! Scary. ;-)
-- haaz.
Since it looks like yet another round of layoffs, I believe my calculations are somewhat correct. They're saying that there are now 9.25 employees left at SGI. = )
Good luck to them. They had such a great reserve of talent and ingenuity, and it's sad to see it floating (somewhat) at the bottom of a pool.
I remember reading an article about people worring about being fired for using linux. Now people are getting ousted for using Windows NT. A twist of fate I must say.
Last time I looked SGI is worth about $12 a share I could be wrong. It might be a good idea to invest.
Now what do they do? They dumped their processor and now buy Intel. They dumped their OS to Linux (their best move). They dumped their graphics to Nvidia, and I guess they still have their software for an OS & processor that is gone.
So who are they now??? I see a company who assembles a computer from purchased parts and sticks a SGI logo on it. What will set them appart? They want to compete with Dell or IBM with Linux installed? Is the vision to get a NVidia board and write graphics software? That doesn't sound like any better situation then they were before. Their overhead would be lower, but the PC competition would kill them.
As a person who's family member works at SGI I can tell you a few things ;) First off SGI hasn't written IRIX off, if anyone believes that Linux has some sort of technological advantage of IRIX they're living under a rock. SGI is moving with Linux on the Intel platform only, their normal machines will still be running Irix until Linux matures enough to replace it (which I doubt will ever happen)
Looks like SGI is two steps away from bankruptcy. I say it's time to make some more Linux announcements and get some free publicity!
For a while there was a bi-weekly round of high-tech schmoozing, photo-ops, announcements of new programs to pave information highways with tax money and to pick the winners. All based at SGI's facility. With two days of more-snarled-than-usual traffic every time.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well, this news come to me just as I purchase my first SGI box. Well, its an old Indy and I am MIGHTILY impressed with the sophistication of IRIX 6.2. It's a shame SGI isn't making it.
I heard from an employee of SGI that sun is outselling SGI on a system which sun licensed from SGI. That is.. the same system branded by SGI is selling less volume!!
I feel sorry for the employees at SGI. But I'de like to say that I think they make very fine products, and regardless of what happens I will be a supporting fan of SGI.
I am NT. I have all the apps. You have to reboot me once or twice a day, but so what, go get a coke. I have all the hardware support. Niche players like SGI are doomed.
If all they do is sell the Linux port of Alias, where would the revenue come from? Since the software would be expected to be free if not open sourced? If they dare to charge money for that software, the SGI HQ would be in flames.
If, after giving all their IRIX technology away to the Linux community, what would they get out of it? Guys like VA Linux and Redhat would just take that to their advantage and make more sales out of it.
I prefer the conspiracy theory that Beluzzo was a Microsoft mole all along. It the only good explanation for his clueless and directionless decision making Gates sent him to SGI to finish off SGI, drive all their best engineers out the door, make them buy lots of Microsoft software for internal use, ship NT products, etc. After the last reorg disaster Bill and Chainsaw Rick decided his job was done so he could take his lucrative reward at Microsoft.
Belluzzo might be joining Microsoft, says this cnet/NYT article.
:)
"When Belluzzo's resignation was announced yesterday, Silicon Graphics spokesman John Cristofano would say only that the departing CEO was leaving to take a position at a company that doesn't compete with SGI." Well, not yet, anyway... this sounds very fishy.
--------
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Their only hope now is their Linux intiative, which frankly seems even more desperate than the NT initiative. Try to think positive. Maybe they will take Linux down with them.
I'm not that familiar with SGI's other products but I've been using a Visual Workstation 320 (with that awesome flat screen monitor.. drool) and while the graphics are mind-numbingly fast (compared to the "Regular" PC I'm writing the OpenGL code on) it doesn't seem all that fast at compiling..
Still - hardware with character is awfully hard to come by.
Wasn't Linux supposed to be SGI's new lease on life? Wasn't the demise of SGI's NT workstation supposed to be the heralding of increased profits from Linux? Didn't SGI develop a whole bunch of development libraries and tools? Does the real world not want a box of development libraries?
I should have listened to my gut instinct when Belluzo joined, but I didn't.
About a year ago, I was on a flight to San Fransisco... I was sitting next to an SGI employee, and we chatted about Belluzo & the "new SGI". I expressed my concern that "jumping on NT" was quite a risky strategy, and even though hundreds of IT shops around the country run by pointy-hairs seem to successfully run their departments by that strategy, I'm not quite sure that a technology industry leader should.
He reassured me that "Belluzzo is great, morale is up and SGI will kick ass."
Unfortunately, NT flopped, and Belluzzo with it. Their only hope now is their Linux intiative, which frankly seems even more desperate than the NT initiative.
I wish I understood SGI's culture better, because I can't see why this bandwagonism is so rampant. I really liked SGI before, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for them, but this is just ridiculous. They already have good products that have been GATHERING DUST for the last 3 years. I haven't seen a major innovation since the O2, Origin and Octane in 1996. The NT Workstation was nice, but too little too late. They made plans (and then scrapped them) for next-generation MIPS chip designs that would effectively make great strides in the data transfer bandwidth of microprocessors - far beyond anything that Intel or Sun would be offering before 2003.
The Origin 2000 is a kick ass ccNUMA architecture and one of the fastest clusters going.. why not improve on it and find better ways to gain market acceptance?
Why not pull a trick out of Apple's bag? That is, stick to what you know best - creating innovative, different and powerful products, while optimizing operational expenses so you can drive the prices down. Beat yourself at YOUR OWN GAME.
The clock is ticking...
-Stu
Let me make it simple - when things like this happen at a company - the best people leave first.
That means at this point all of the SGI "stars" are most likely gone.
As for products and marketing, they simply got too big for their niche and were unable to market themselves as anything but a graphics unit. Sometimes you just have to be satisfied working your strengths, even at the expense of empire-building. SGI learned this the hard way.
It's really sad to hear about SGI's state of affairs. They're one of the coolest tech companies ever, and they're the premier 3D (and computing in general) innovators. It would be a great loss to the tech industry if SGI were to die, the same with Apple. You may not use or like their stuff, but you can't deny their (SGI and Apple) influence on the rest of the industry is enourmous, even if their combined marketshare doesn't look that great.
It seems to me SGI can't keep a coherent strategy for very long. They are losing people at an alarming rate.
I think something really drastic needs to be done, if SGi is to survive.
Anyone care to chime in with their suggestions as to what SGI needs to do to right the ship?