The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

The article doesn't mention the reason for the fall: less good but cheaper competitors. First Sun, then Windows NT and Linux.

> The article doesn't mention the reason for the fall: less good but cheaper competitors

The article has this: ''As Bob Bishop took the reigns of SGI, things looked dark. AMD announced their 64 bit architecture in October, PC graphics had made massive strides while remaining significantly less expensive than SGI’s offerings, NT was proving to be a solid and less expensive competitor to UNIX, Linux was eating away at traditional UNIX market segments, and Itanium still hadn’t launched.''

I can agree with almost all of that statement but I object to the ''NT was proving to be a solid and less expensive competitor to UNIX'' part as mostly false in any mixed OS environment over which I'd ever been admin.

Look harder

Well, do remember the cost of a UNIX license at the time (unless you were using BSD). If you didn’t have thousands of dollars on hand, NT was a good choice.

But that's 1999, and they were already losing money in 1997, and the article doesn't say why. Sun was why.