←back to thread

The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

(www.abortretry.fail)
346 points BirAdam | 1 comments | 05 Apr 24 16:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.213s | source
Show context
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.

replies(24): >>39945445 #>>39945479 #>>39945482 #>>39945689 #>>39945716 #>>39945753 #>>39946158 #>>39946264 #>>39946444 #>>39947143 #>>39947437 #>>39947638 #>>39947930 #>>39948579 #>>39948653 #>>39948877 #>>39948901 #>>39949363 #>>39949453 #>>39950393 #>>39950670 #>>39950973 #>>39951304 #>>39970462 #
1. foobiekr ◴[05 Apr 24 21:26 UTC] No.39947437[source]▶
I was at one of SGI's competitors and we had teams doing cheap HW - ATi and other cards, like IBM's GPUs at the time - and yet the company as a whole was like "ALL GOOD LET'S KEEP BUILDING MASSIVE CUSTOM GRAPHICS SYSTEMS!"

They were as dead as SGI in the same timeframe.