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SGI Steps out of the Visual Workstation Market
Lars Bergstrom writes "Well, SGI's finally given up on their Visual Workstation product line -- check here for the details. " As many people have noted, the technology was pretty sweet, but people won't pay the huge premiums for that. At least the flat panels are great.
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Mind you, from all the VARs and such I know and hear complain, margins on hardware are slim going on nonexistant right now for just about everyone aside from maybe Intel and... uh... Intel.
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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Don't be so quick to count SGI out. They have many very valuable technologies (cc/NUMA, XFS...), great hardware (look at their clustered stuff sometime; also, MIPS is about the cleanest chip architecture you'll ever see), and while they seem to be clutching at straws by jumping on the Linux bandwagon, you never know where that bandwagon might take them. Let's just wait and see.
"SGI will try to give Linux a boost by releasing some of its OpenGL graphics software into the open-source community, Stedman said."
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Like GPL-ing it? While MesaGL is a worthy alternative, it would be in SGI's best interests to get OpenGL into wider usage. I suppose there may be licensing implications if they were to try and GPL the whole shebang, as many companies have already *purchased* licenses. So perhaps we'll see an open source 'official' OpenGL when those licenses expire
Chris Wareham
"Sexiest hardware in existance ..."
Personally I've got a soft spot for Sun pizza style cases, and improbably huge 24bit framebuffer cards. Must be a nostalgia thing I suppose. Although someone claimed to be able to get hold of recent Ultra workstations in Pizza boxes instead of those boring mini-towers.
Chris Wareham
1: Figure out your core strength. In this case delivering a _compleat_ high end workstation.
2: Abandon projects that are loosing money. In this case Cray, and Visual Workstation.
3: Cut expenditure as much as possible without reducing production. In this case adopt Linux for as much as reasonably possible. at SGI that's low end servers and eventually most workstations ( once the software ecosystem has grown up a bit ).
4: Market like crazy. notice how many SGI stories are appearing in papers of late ?
5: Make deals with anyone who can give you money and / or grow your market. In this case SGI has invested in VALinux and has joined Linux international. They are also a partner on the retail Debian.
Only time can tell how well this will work but since it was such a good strategy for Apple, why not SGI ?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The SGI investor page says it all
www.sgi.com/investors
(press reload a few time for maximum effect)
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Regardless of where they may stand right now, the truth is that to the public sector SGI has always ment design quality and superiority. SGI has a relatively small market cap - 1.49 billion. Regardless of that a billion dollars is a billion dollars. What happens if SGI makes smart investments - what happens if the company downsizes, what happens if the company does this or that. There are so many possibilities it's frightening. This has partially their problem - they have so many possible outcomes and variations to what they currently do that they could go one of a number of different ways. Unfortunately they do not have the fanaticism that the average Mac user has. SGI has the right idea though. Embrace a fanatical group of people - Linux geeks. Now we have another company trying to make a buck off Linux - giving Linux commercial support (which is important for enterprise and end user systems) -- the only difference here is that SGI is trying to save their ass w/ Linux. If they pull it off they will definately come out better in at least the server market then the Windows NT sellers will. Hell look at Sun Microsystems and what happened to them over the past few years -- SGI may not be a bad investment once they start honing what they want to do...
He did it for apple.. Although SGI already has colored computers.... /A
This may say more about the high-end wintel graphics workstation market than about SGI in particular. 'Consumer' 3D accelerators are available now that can give a Celeron-based PC comparable performance to 'Mid range' (SGI Visual workstation, Intergraph, etc.) systems sold _today_ for a order of magnitude more money. Could it be that there simply no longer exists a middle ground between the real high end dedicated graphics development systems, and the lowly PC?
I'm surprised people here are so ignorant about the realities of the marketplace.
... the XIO bus still beats the wet dreams of FutureIO and is here now) but then they do certify and guarentee the performance of the ones that do make the effort. If SGI was smart, they'd license the XIO technology to foster a vibrant alternative.
Facts
1) If a company doesn't have a competitive advantage, then sooner or later it will lose marketshare. The NT based Intel line (idea of the previous CEO) was targetting a niche which has been eroded by Dell's just-in-time assembly and creating a gap until HDTV standards become mandatory. SGI is being smart cutting their losses when they can. Unlike the disposable mentality that Wintel is trying to foster, SGI machines are designed to last for a long time (10 years+) which if your amortise the higher upfront costs, is actually cheaper in the long run.
2) SGI still has 300 odd engineers working on Irix and a growing pool of Linux developers to progressively shift their core competencies (multiprocessor design, low-latency memory subsystems) into value-added components. 10% of the market is seriously interested in high performance vs good enough.
3) Processors take a long time to die. Their MIPS line still has got excellent cost per application performance and decent data bandwidth (running a gigahertz Intel chip with IDE drives to surf the internet sounds a little fishy). As an embedded processor, the x86 is dwarfed by sales of MIPS cores cross-licensed to multiple vendors and their high-end stuff (R16000, etc) goes out to another 7 years.
4) The world market has been very very lucky in the Asian crisis has depressed global supply to such an extent that firms are willing to sell subsystems at near cost just to keep the cashflow up. In my opinion this has distorted the market and once things start bouncing back (as with the recent hike in memory prices) then their offerings will be more competitive.
5) Intel is becoming more like a venture capitalist than chip maker by throwing advanced designs at anything that looks, walks and talks like a high-growth startup. SGI is sorta doing the same thing by developing high-end, then flowing the tech to NDIVA (graphics), Cray (memory subsystem) and MIPS (CPU design).
6) Forget hardware, the value is now concentrated on the services. Even IBM are finding it difficult to move their big iron. Ultimately you will see companies becoming coordinators assembling components and software bundles to targetting specific market categories and capturing benefits from after-sales support and in the life-time money stream. You'd might be surprised how little car manufacturers make from sell the initial wheels compared with gouring consumers with repairs and add on knic-knacs.
7) Linux is shifting the competitive landscape in that every processors has an equal chance as the source is available to all players. Intel is recognising this and is dumping money to maintain dominance. If IBM can offer a PPC reference design, then perhaps SGI could do something similar for their MIPS, OpenGL and other graphics libraries (ie OpenAPI but retain implementation IP). Don't rule out the Koreas with their Alpha licensing and the Japanese with MIPS variants (e.g. Sony Playstation2).
8) Lighten up, markets go up and down in the short term. If anyone recalls the dumping Apple was going through several years ago, SGI is going through a similar patch. With a new CEO on board and some good Linux buzz, they have opportunities to catch the next wave. From a professional point of view, it would be interesting to see if their boxes could be adapted to keep the same fast memory subsystem but accept MIPS, Cray, Intel or Alpha processor node cards and just absolutely dominate the SMP and Beowulf market.
9) High end graphics is tough with very few firms having the capability to tackle complex real-time graphics and simulation. Today's multiplayer games are a shadow of hosting real-time thousands of players. If SGI could shift some of their talent to exploit the gaming niche, then they could gain more revenue streams from selling their IP. Admittedly they do have problems with delayed supply of third party boards (sigh
In short, SGI may be down at the moment but certainly not out. You don't have to be big so long as you can be profitable in your own little market niche, afterall BMW and Rolls-Royce still survive despite the Fords, Hondas, etc of the world. If people stop fixating on pure clock speed and look at real-world performance (e.g. broadband systems) they might be pleasantly surprised.
LL
It seems to me that there wasn't much added value in SGI's "nonstandard" approach. The company I worked for benchmarked Visual Workstations against their competition and, not only weren't they on top, but they frequently were the worst or close to it. This surprised (and disappointed) me, but I'm told others have had similar results.
to fall?
It seems the companies who helped Microsoft to grow are doing OK.
But the companies that had competing products, like VMS or Iris who decided to partner up with Microsoft have suffered.
HP backtracked on the 'unix is dead, NT is the future' of a few years ago. (Wonder how much they lost....)
So: Who's next? (Who is left???!?!?)
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Just wanted to make that clear.
CmdrTaco: was that headline your idea?
You are certainly becoming a journalist by all measures....
Dag B
Where did you read that? They are dropping some lines of workstations,
not "stepping out of the market". Their MIPS roadmap extends, it says,
to 2006 and their Intel plans are very much in place.
Slashdot could do with editors who actually read the subject matter.
I agree. SGI are still going strong.
;-)
Actually, I'm not surprised that it didn't work out with the "Visual Workstations". If I would want to spend a lot of cash on a workstation for 3d graphics, I would by an O2 or Octane or something.
Why settle for an intel machine when you can have the power of MIPS
I think it's important to note that their MIPS line of workstations, such as the O2, Octane, etc is still being sold. They're out of the NT workstation biz, but not out of the workstation biz period.
About a year ago when they introduced the NT line, I predicted that they would be unable to sell into what is largely a commodity market. Clearly, I was right.
Personally, I think they should abandon their plans to abandon Irix, which makes their high-end hardware feel distinctly orphan-ish. Either do that, or port Linux to the old machines so they won't become obsolete quickly.
Of course I'm still using my circa 1994 Indigo2, and I still love it. If SGI depreciation in the marketplace continues at this pace, I'll be able to afford a dual-processor Octane soon. But I'll cry for the company as I sign the check.
D
PS Happy Thanksgiving, Slashdot!
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Unfortunately, this isn't a substantial profit centre for SGI, as they probably only make a few bucks per farmed-out MIPS CPU. To turn this into significant help, there need to be millions of CPUs being sold for this purpose, and I just don't see that happening.
This looked like a useful synergy; Cray didn't have the quantity of sales to allow development of all the hardware they needed, and if SGI could use some of it in other product lines, that could make the costs more readily amortized, and even improve performance on SGI's "own" product lines.
I suspect Cray holds a bunch of critical patents on computer hardware for HPC; killer question is who's going to want to buy, when SGI couldn't make the synergies work...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
It only says they're getting rid of the Win NT based boxes NOT the Linux based Intel or IRIX based MIPS workstations.
according to some people I know, SGI will come out whit a new line of machines early next year. They will be linux only and have the same great IO as the NT machines possibly whit, firewire and USB, they will feature NVIDIA 3D graphics chip set (most likely some type of Gforce) Since it will be a linux only machine It doesn't have to be a x86 processor, it may even be a risc.
I think it is fairly likely that we will see some thing like the above, and I even think it may save SGI if the pricing is right. SGI is the best when it comes to IO, and whit the help of Nvidia and linux they could survive.
SGI came to be a hardware company because they needed specialised hardware to run their very cool graphics software. Their hardware did amazing stuff and people who did 3D graphics were willing to buy SGIs. Many cars were designed on SGI's. Even a little custom machine shop back home had an SGI running Engineering Pro. But that was yesterday.
Today the little machine shop is running AutoCad on a cheap but overpowered Intel box. A local 3D animation studio is using dual P2s with 3DMax. They looked at an SGI. It was sweet. It was faster. But not 6 times faster and that is how much more it cost. The Wintel stuff is dirt cheap and quite powerfull. SGI dosen't enjoy the nearly same performance magin that it did less then 5 years ago. The auto makers may still be buying the SGI stuff, but for how long?
SGI is suffocating on the consequences of Moore's law. Every nine months the commodity market doubles its performance. How in hell can one single company outpace that race?
I'm sure the next ones will be Sun. Unlike IBM, with MVS, CICS, and so on, Sun has fewer proprietary APIs and other hooks protecting it from customers moving to the cheaper end of the market.
Oracle, on the contrary, has always embraced and extended its proprietary APIs, beyond the reach of competing ODBC databases. You won't see Oracle submerged that fast in the sea of rising commoditazation.
Another strong API in the market is SAP R/3. No way customers who have implemented those APIs will ever be able to get rid of SAP Inc, without forfeiting a huge outlay in implementation costs.
The strongest hooks are of course the ones in Win32.
Since there are no significant proprietary APIs tying SGI to its customer base, customers incur no cost in moving to whatever they want. The same holds true for Sun.
Five years from now, there will be no SGI and no Sun to speak of any longer. Ten years from now, I guess most Unix vendors will have disappeared. I think Microsoft is right to say that Linux will, in the first place, eat into the Unix market.
SGI has a lot of other things going and some we know are dragging them down. Irix on big workstations and humongus servers isn't one of those "problem areas".
It's just that the Irix market is very very small so it alone won't hold up a company the size of SGI.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
are the obvious ease of use, desktop publishing and to some extent doing pretty machines.
:)
The iMac fit in the core ease of use market since it was the simplest machine on the market to get up and running after opening the box. Now they have an iBook, not so people can do stuff on the road but rather so you don't have to plug in a keyboard.
PS: That was a joke
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The more we hear from SGI, the clearer it becomes that massive and fundamental changes have taken place inside the company, not just in public policy but in their understanding of their market and future prospects. Corporations of that size don't change direction on a whim and at a moment's notice. Like an oil tanker, there is a delay between cause and effect, so changes have to be well considered.
I don't have any involvement with SGI, but from the outside it seems to me that they've reached the following conclusions: (i) only their bigger machines are sector leaders and possibly still make a profit; (ii) their earlier preeminence in workstation graphics has been decimated by the collosal improvement in the capabilities of PC graphics cards; (iii) workstation-class CPUs and large memories are now commodity items, so SGI workstations can no longer claim that niche; (iv) SGI have excellent hardware techies but they cannot compete in this new commodity market because margins are far too small; (v) it is very difficult to compete against free software / open source in a market like theirs where users are technically competent, and "if you can't beat them, join them"; (vi) not all is well with the Microsoft titanic, and seats in the lifeboats are starting to look inviting so they are playing down their involvement with NT; (vii) in contrast, things look very rosy for Linux, in particular the wide acceptance among developers that this is A Good Platform, so they're playing that up to be developer-friendly and clearly "with it"; (viii) the synergy among other relevant corporates is massive in this area, and no way can SGI afford not to be on the same boat as, for example, Oracle; (ix) no major computer manufacturer has yet capitalized on the potential of Linux (nor the BSDs), and SGI could be The One that makes it "their own" if they genuinely adopt the ideals of the community; and finally, (x) software development (particularly maintenance) is incredibly expensive to provide, so making the most of open development on the Internet makes huge economic sense, ie. their overheads in that area could plummet.
All this adds up to a major shift, both internal and external: bye bye to the low-end proprietary stuff as per the announcement, leave computer basics to the commodity suppliers, at most customize PC workstations with high-end accelerators where margins still exist, leave Irix to their big systems where development costs won't decimate the spreadsheet, develop synergy with the free/OSS community, both as excellent value-for-money PR and as an essential component of their open support strategy, assist technically to give Linux some of the scalability that Irix has on their bigger machines, add in enterprise-critical facilities like a journalling filesystem, and in general hype up the whole scene so that they register in the books of PHBs as potential customers and shareholders.
The only thing that isn't consistent with this is their statement about continuing to support their MIPs systems at least until 2006, but I suppose that can be put down to not wanting to abandon their old customer base. That makes sense, as long as they don't spend too much money in this area of diminishing returns.
All in all, if their thinking is anything like the above then I reckon they have a good chance of making a success of it. They certainly can't be accused of doing nothing as the wind changes direction.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
As far as I'm concerned, SGI bowed out of the workstation market when they began offering intel CPU's running Windows. Like Packard Bell.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Mmmm.... candy colored computers.
Steve Jobs did save Apple, no doubt about it. And he did it by cancelling projects that didn't make money. Apple had a lot of really really cool technology before Jobs. Cyberdog, Darwin, OpenDoc... all of it got "Steved". SGI needs to do the same thing to save itself. FOCUS. Now Apple is focused on producing great professional computers (G4's, PowerBooks), great consumer computers (iMac's, iBooks) and a great OS (Mac OS X a.k.a. Rhapsody). They even open-sourced the core technology of Mac OS X. Sweet. SGI needs to focus on high-end workstations, Irix, and MIPS. And they could join the party and open-source openGL, which would be cool of them.
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MacBoy
that's my story and I'm stickin' to it
Just have to say that I was NOT very impressed by their visual workstation product line. Spent a few days at work testing out the SGI Visual Workstation 320. The NT workstation with same processor and a TNT2 3D graphics card had higher frame rate and fillrate in every possible application.
The only good thing was that it use less processing power. Got to give it to them though - the flat screen monitor was sooo sweet.
Why spend lot's of money even trying to gain market share - good thing they've teamed up with NVidia. Some of SGI's technology is really good but the power and the turnover of the new 3D graphics companies makes for some really hard competition when it comes to developing new technology. Scary.
Conclusion:
I'm troubled - let's all take a moment.
SGI are giving up on two things neither or which is the line itself:
1) They are giving up on selling off the Visual Workstation business
2) They are giving up on making the Visual Workstations with SGI value-add features added in that drove the prices higher, even though that was the only thing that differentiated them in marketplace.
Read the article it states:
Now SGI plans to keep the product line under its own roof, but will drastically reduce the refinements it makes to higher-end desktop systems running Intel chips and often Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, Geoff Stedman, SGI's Visual Workstation marketing director, said in an interview.
Essentially SGI will just make plain-old NT Workstations ala Compaq or Dell.
-ShieldWolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
The new MacOS X is BSD based..... Actually the OS team is using FreeBSD as a reference platform. Go figure.
not even close..
Apple got saved becoase of these reasons:
1) killing of the clones - apple got monopoly of the mac market again = no mac competition = higher revenew streams + higher profit margins.
2) Killing non-esential projects: newton, 6 slot motherboards.
3) making SMART tech design decisions - embracing USB is the biggest one, imho since it forced all USB perifiral vendors to seriously concider developing mac drivers.
4) FINALY fully capitalizing on one of apples majors advantages: a Kick ass Industrial design team, probably the best in the industry. (the emate and 20th mac, are not mainstream products).
5) last but not least: the mac comunity and Apples STRONG culture - which in turn means that a bunch of people who will NOT convert to other platforms if thier life depended on it (not a bad thing..) And most Geeks have fond memories of Apple products, if not the Mac then Apple II.
Look at SGI and tell me if any of this things might apply...
non of them do. the only two things that resemble this are the industial design (which isn;t internal in SGI - they usealy hire Frogdesign), and they might theoretcly take a lead in graphics if they cancel OpenGL... But it's a little too late for that, isn't it..
SGI does not have much culture, the little they has was KILLED when they changed their name to SGI and scratched the 3d box LOGO. IMHO the stupidest image move a company made this year (tied up with ArtX..)
I personaly can't see how SGI might find a way to stage a comeback.. unless they make a very bold move. They do have some nice tech even leading tech in some ereas (Maya being the most obvious, IMHO). but nothing that I can see that might make them a power player again.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
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One thing both companies have in common is a large installed base of loyal users that aren't cracking the wallets open as often as they "should" to upgrade. Both SGI and Apple have made some great machines, and they typically have a much longer lifespan than your typical PC, and people tend to hang onto them longer.
The genius of the iMac and the G3 is that it got many of the old Performa and Quadra users to buy a new Apple. SGI needs a similar product for their installed base, and the NT/Intel workstation wasn't it.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
If you were here in the states I could get you a bucket of 24 bit framebuffers for about $10. SPARCstations (10s, 20s, 5s, 4s, etc) are dirt cheap over here. I just picked up a 8 CPU SPARCserver 1000 with 512MB of RAM, 10/100 ethernet, extra SCSI card, and 17" Sun monitor for $100.
I don't think you can put Aldi Pc's on the same ground as SGI machines (or any other well build power machine). Ever opened an Aldi PC? Well I sell you the same stuff even cheaper. Indeed, SGI is priced endlessly high, but it isn't ment for everyday home/hobby use. It seems to me some firms are forgetting that a home pc does not equal a workstation/server client. (and not at least some small self-employed people who have the nerve to say the PC you sold them suxs because they played some copied games and got themselves some virusses)
1800 on the 540 No other PC can touch this. Among workstations, only O2. It just happens that YOUR application does not need this feature. Others can't live without it. They ARE impressive machines, if only you knew how to look at them.
The first Suns I ever ran were Sun 2s. They were built around the Moto 68K line (as were the later Sun 3s) and weren't much different from other microprocessors available at the time - except for the bit-mapped graphics displays.
These machines were workstations. Period. Sure, they had "servers" to run of the disks of the diskless workstations (amazing to think today that saving the cost of a disk drive used to be a big deal), but they weren't what you'd think of as a server today.
Today, Sun is really a minicomputer company. They've been moving upscale for years now, as cheaper Intel hardware eats their lunch at the low end. IA-64 must be worrying them sick. What will happen to Sun when Intel CPU's are just as good as the latest SPARCs?
Truth is, the old model of proprietary machines, where one company provides the hardware, the OS, and sometimes even the all the apps is going away. Microsoft realized years ago the value in separating the hardware from the software. What's amazing is that nobody else seems to have caught on to this.
Linux's avantage is that it plays in the new model space where the OS doesn't come from the hardware suppliers. So the hardware has to compete solely on price/performance. End result will be fewer proprietary computer manufactorers.
sgi has lost its original founding vision, while one could argue that this isn't true, that it is still marketing and selling topnotch stuff the way it always did, nevertheless things are not looking good. time to put off the excuses and start turning in homeworks on time, study before the next class, and well in advance of exams. the pc-era has almost caught up to the workstation era. time to think and act differently. merge with nVidia,(what is nVidia, but a group of talents that were born and raised at sgi, matured at nVidia?) bring forth better graphics to the masses. mainstream convergence. good soul food for y2k. Quoting John Carmack, of IdSoftware(you know, the people that brought us castle Wolfenstein), "...a lot of trends are coming to the point where a "cyberspace" as it is often imagined is begining to be feasible." this convergence thingy is fascinating... the old vision: bring cool graphics computers to the graphics people. thus a new vision: bring cool graphics computers to the mere mortals. happy fraggin, --cornmuffin
SGI is not getting rid of their entire visual workstation line! Just the intel based ones for now, remeber that the O2 and Octane are listed under the visual workstation category. Oh, and did anybody notice that at the end of the article they said something about an Oxygen workstation? Either I just missed something or he ment to say Onyx.
...until they restore the old logo. That's all there is to it.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
The machines probably didn't sell well because of the logo. The old metallic thingie was one thousand times cooler than the flat 'sgi' logo that they put on their machines now. Although the machines are still great technically, it's the logo that ruins the design. That said, they did the right thing in stopping the 320 and 540, because SGI should be RISC! Gimme one of those O2's!
yeah, open sourcing Mach was a really big deal
Such a pity. When these systems were announced only a few short months ago(what was it, the spring??)they seemed so incredible. The idea, bring x86 into the true graphical workstation business, with WINDOWS no less, what a concept.
And then at the time, people yelled that the Visual Workstations should have been running Linux, not Windows, and perhaps SGI suddenly realized the mistake it had made, and then they started supporting Linux whole-heartedly, right?
Well...perhaps.
I think the truth is that these machines failed not becuase of SGI or anything they might have done....I think we might blame Microsoft for this one. Why? Well to start off with, the Visual Workstations were designed FROM THE START to use Windows 2000, and it shows too, with the machines having Firewire, USB, and a multitude of other features that Win2k supposedly supports(or will support). Unfortunately, in true M$ fashion, their product was late(so late, in fact, that it won't be around until February!), and SGI had to hack NT4.0 so at least the input devices would work under MS's operating system(both the keyboard and mouse are USB, which NT4 does not support). This still leaves most of the other high end features of the Workstations left to rot while SGI waited patiently for 2000 to be released.
But then May comes around(at the time of the Visual Workstations' announcement, Win2000 was slated for a May/June 1999 release), and MS delays shipment once again....they are left stuck with a half disabled system that is supposed to be their new Flagship! So what to they do? They turn to their only option, jump ship from Windows and try Linux.
Over the next four months, SGI pours quite a bit of funding into Linux development and resources, but by August/September, they realize the Visual Workstation is a failure, with incomplete Linux support, a half broken Windows implementation, so they admit it is a failure and let their stillborn child go.
What a shame...the Visual Workstation's could have been so much, had MS delivered Win2000 on schedule(like about two years ago!). I'd bet the Visual Workstations would have been released a year earlier too, and done MUCH better in that market than they did in the one of this year.
R.I.P. Visual Workstations...we hardly knew you.
Cliff Palmer, Jr.
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
Sybase got the short end of the stick when they partnered with M$ and basically reimplemented their SQL server on NT. Now M$ has a competitive product(If only because it is by M$) and sybase fizzled away into oblivion.
And lets not forget it's not just M$, it is the whole WinTel world. Look at Intergraph, making superior SPARC boxes until they decided to switch to the Intel market, then Intel took all their graphics technology and left them out to dry.
HP's PA-RISC replacement, implemented via VLIW, where its design was completed in the early-mid '90s got snatched up by Intel when all they were trying to do is look for a fabricator, then it got so delayed that it became non-competitive. Their next generation design, which was started because of Intel's extensive delay in taping it out, got snatched up by Intel again as soon as it got on the grapevine. This whole fiasco eventually forced them to backtrack and made them go back and plan for 4 more generations of their PA architecture while Intel is trying to make their baby X86 compatable.
Oxygen is a project for new computing at MIT.
When are they going to figure out that they public won't buy proprietary trash any more?
SGI getting out of the visual workstation could also have something to do with many of the 3D applications being ported to OSX. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, SGI beat feet. Instead of the movies being made on SGI, It will be G4's running OSX. Right now Jobs is a very powerful man in Hollywood. He will grab the content creation in Hollywood, and with QuickTime and FireWire, the delivery. Wonder what the Apple Cinema Display portents? Read the Motley Fool Microsoft vs Linux article. Jobs is doing basically the same thing. He's doing an end run around MS.
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