SGI is dying, and this unfortunatly not many can deny. They used to be the state of the art bad-ass workstations. Hell, I learned most of my Unix from an SGI Indy and an AIX RS/6000. Now I own a Challenge & Indigo^2. Remember back in '90 how we used to be in complete awe of the demos that came with IRIX? They were always known to be unique, one of a kind. They had class, they had style.
But then in mid-97 it just all began to fall apart unfortunatly. Their Unix workstations weren't selling, they were losing competitive edge against Sun and NT workstations.. so they tried to jump on the NT bandwagon.
I as a previous SGI fan felt isolated by the jump to NT, and I wasn't alone. Their NT workstations just didn't sell as much as they wanted, so now their jumping onto the Linux bandwagon. It's great for the free-software industry (I myself can't wait to have some really nice OpenGL support on my FreeBSD workstation), but I think it's not done because they love free software, I think it's more of a marketing ploy. "We couldn't compete with the people who love NT, lets compete for the people who love free stuff, once we can convince the penguins that didnt realize we sold out that we're God, they can spread the word to the world"....
This of course is not to say that they haven't dipped their toes in the free-software industry for some time as the other unix vendors have, the difference now is they make press-releases.
And then they tried to switch their name from Silicon Graphics to "sgi".. owell. I give them credit for trying. I don't give them credit for giving up.
-- Proud owner of two beautiful real SGI workstations. Proud to say that they will only be running IRIX.
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SGI is dying, and this unfortunatly not many can deny. They used to be the state of the art bad-ass workstations. Hell, I learned most of my Unix from an SGI Indy and an AIX RS/6000. Now I own a Challenge & Indigo^2. Remember back in '90 how we used to be in complete awe of the demos that came with IRIX? They were always known to be unique, one of a kind. They had class, they had style.
But then in mid-97 it just all began to fall apart unfortunatly. Their Unix workstations weren't selling, they were losing competitive edge against Sun and NT workstations.. so they tried to jump on the NT bandwagon.
I as a previous SGI fan felt isolated by the jump to NT, and I wasn't alone. Their NT workstations just didn't sell as much as they wanted, so now their jumping onto the Linux bandwagon. It's great for the free-software industry (I myself can't wait to have some really nice OpenGL support on my FreeBSD workstation), but I think it's not done because they love free software, I think it's more of a marketing ploy. "We couldn't compete with the people who love NT, lets compete for the people who love free stuff, once we can convince the penguins that didnt realize we sold out that we're God, they can spread the word to the world"....
This of course is not to say that they haven't dipped their toes in the free-software industry for some time as the other unix vendors have, the difference now is they make press-releases.
And then they tried to switch their name from Silicon Graphics to "sgi".. owell. I give them credit for trying. I don't give them credit for giving up.
-- Proud owner of two beautiful real SGI workstations. Proud to say that they will only be running IRIX.