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The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

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346 points BirAdam | 2 comments | 05 Apr 24 16:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.441s | source
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tombert ◴[05 Apr 24 17:07 UTC] No.39944744[source]▶
There's a few cases in the history of computers where it feels like the world just "chose wrong". One example is the Amiga; the Amiga really was better than anything Apple or Microsoft/IBM was doing at the time, but for market-force reasons that depress me, Commodore isn't the "Apple" of today.

Similarly, it feels like Silicon Graphics is a case where they really should have become more standard. Now, unlike Amiga, they were too expensive to catch on with regular consumers, but I feel like they should have become and stayed the "standard" for workstation computers.

Irix was a really cool OS, and 4Dwm was pretty nice to use and play with. It makes me sad that they beaten by Apple.

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hn_throwaway_99 ◴[05 Apr 24 17:14 UTC] No.39944821[source]▶
> Similarly, it feels like Silicon Graphics is a case where they really should have become more standard. Now, unlike Amiga, they were too expensive to catch on with regular consumers, but I feel like they should have become and stayed the "standard" for workstation computers.

I think you highlighted very correctly there, though, why SGI lost. It turned out there were cheaper options, which while not on par with SGI workstations initially, just improved at a faster rate than SGI and eventually ended up with a much better cost/functionality profile. I feel like SGI just bet wrong. The article talks about how they acquired Cray, which were originally these awesome supercomputers. But it turned out supercomputers essentially got replaced by giant networks of much lower cost PCs.

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1. tombert ◴[05 Apr 24 17:23 UTC] No.39944896[source]▶
Yeah, I'm more annoyed about Amiga than SGI. They were priced competitively with Apple and IBM offerings.

I guess it's just kind of impossible to predict the future. I don't think it's an incompetent decision to try and focus entirely on the workstation world; there are lots of businesses that make no attempt to market to consumers, and only market to large companies/organizations, since the way budgeting works with big companies is sort of categorically different than consumer budgets.

But you're absolutely right. Apple and Windows computers just kept getting better and better, faster and faster, and cheaper and cheaper, as did 3D modeling and video editing software for them. I mean, hell, as a 12 year old kid in 2003, I had both Lightwave 3D (student license) and Screenblast Movie Studio (now Vegas) running on my cheap, low-spec desktop computer, and it was running fast enough to be useful (at least for standard definition).

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2. mike_hearn ◴[05 Apr 24 17:32 UTC] No.39944994[source]▶
Of course, the reason they got better so fast is volume. There was just way more investment into those platforms. Which means this explanation is somewhat circular: they were successful because they were successful.

I think a more useful explanation is that people rate the value of avoiding vendor lockin extraordinarily high, to the extent that people will happily pick worse technology if there's at least two competing vendors to choose from. The IBM PCs were not good, but for convoluted legal reasons related to screwups by IBM their tech became a competitive ecosystem. Bad for IBM, good for everyone else. Their competitors did not make that "mistake" and so became less preferred.

Microsoft won for a while despite being single vendor because the alternative was UNIX, which was at least sorta multi-vendor at the OS level, except that portability between UNIXen was ropey at best in the 90s and of course you traded software lockin for hardware lockin; not really an improvement. Combined with the much more expensive hardware, lack of gaming and terrible UI toolkits (of which Microsoft was the undisputed master in the 90s) and then later Linux, and that was goodbye to them.

Of course after a decade of the Windows monopoly everyone was looking for a way out and settled on abusing an interactive document format, as it was the nearest thing lying around that was a non-Microsoft specific way to display UI. And browsers were also a competitive ecosystem so a double win. HTML based UIs totally sucked for the end users, but .... multi-vendor is worth more than nice UI, so, it wins.

See also how Android wiped out every other mobile OS except iOS (nobody cares much about lockin for mobile apps, the value of them is just not high enough).