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The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

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346 points BirAdam | 9 comments | 05 Apr 24 16:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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martinpw ◴[05 Apr 24 18:13 UTC] No.39945361[source]▶
Whenever this topic comes up there are always comments saying that SGI was taken by surprise by cheap hardware and if only they had seen it coming they could have prepared for it and managed it.

I was there around 97 (?) and remember everyone in the company being asked to read the book "The Innovator's Dilemma", which described exactly this situation - a high end company being overtaken by worse but cheaper competitors that improved year by year until they take the entire market. The point being that the company was extremely aware of what was happening. It was not taken by surprise. But in spite of that, it was still unable to respond.

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1. Animats ◴[05 Apr 24 18:52 UTC] No.39945753[source]▶
They sort of tried. Around then they had a Windows NT machine that cost around US$12,000. But it was too late. The first serious graphics cards for PCs were appearing, from Matrox and others, with prices of a few thousand dollars.

(I tried some early NT graphics cards on a Pentium Pro machine. This was before gamer GPUs; these were pro cards from tiny operations. Fujitsu tried unsuccessfully to get into that business, with a small business unit in Silicon Valley. At one point they loaned me a Fujitsu Sapphire graphics card prototype. When I went back to their office to return it, the office had closed.)

Also, there was a bad real estate deal. SGI owned a lot of land where Google HQ is now. They sold it to Goldman Sachs in a sale and lease-back transaction, selling at the bottom of the market. That land, the area north of US 101 in Mountain View had, and has, a special property tax break. It's the "Shoreline Regional Park Community", set up in 1969. The area used to be a dump. Those hills near Google HQ are piles of trash. So there was a tax deal to get companies to locate there. That made the land especially valuable.

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2. msisk6 ◴[05 Apr 24 19:15 UTC] No.39946004[source]▶
SGI tried its hand at the PC video card business as early as 1990. I was at Autodesk at the time and got one of these to beta test on a DOS 486 running AutoCAD. It was an impressive product. But huge; it took up two full-length ISA slots. And the display drivers were a bit buggy.
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3. sillywalk ◴[05 Apr 24 20:35 UTC] No.39946895[source]▶
Here's a brochure for the IrisVision boards - uses 2 ISA or Microchannel slots.

Prices start start at $3,495

https://www.1000bit.it/js/web/viewer.html?file=%2Fad%2Fbro%2...

4. Y_Y ◴[05 Apr 24 20:55 UTC] No.39947098[source]▶
Sounds just like Nvidia in 2024
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5. rbanffy ◴[05 Apr 24 22:25 UTC] No.39948021[source]▶
I wish they ported IRIX to x86. You can make more money by making stuff for Windows, but it won't protect you from market erosion.
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6. nradov ◴[05 Apr 24 23:34 UTC] No.39948533{3}[source]▶
I doubt that would have helped. Customers didn't love Irix as an OS. They tolerated it in order to use SGI's superior hardware and specialized applications.

Competitors such as Sun did port their proprietary Unix flavors to the x86 PC platform but never achieved traction. It was impossible to compete with free Linux, and lack of device drivers was always an obstacle.

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7. theandrewbailey ◴[06 Apr 24 01:05 UTC] No.39949078{3}[source]▶
Except Nvidia's modern cards are even bigger.
8. ◴[06 Apr 24 05:55 UTC] No.39950325{4}[source]▶
9. rbanffy ◴[06 Apr 24 11:31 UTC] No.39951718{4}[source]▶
Kind of. Oxide uses what's left of OpenSolaris as their OS of choice and Oracle still sells Solaris SPARC servers. It's the retreat up - they can defend their hill for a long time that way and, in Oracle's case, they don't even innovate the same way IBM does with POWER and Z.