The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

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.

In the late 90s I was in the last year of high school. Silicon Graphics came to do a demo of their hardware for students that were interested in taking a computer science course at university in the following year.

The graphics demos looked like trash, basically just untextured and badly shaded plain colored objects rotating on the screen. For reference I was playing Quake III around the time which had detailed textures and dynamic lighting.

I asked the SGI presenter what one of his Indigo workstations cost. He said $40,000, not including the graphics card! That’s extra.

I laughed in his face and walked out.

In the late 90s, SGI demos were much more impressive than what you describe. It was used by technical folks to do real stuff, with stringent criteria.

More importantly, the things that made Quake III so great were state-of-the-art for gaming. But those things couldn't render lines quickly and well (a mainstay of CAD at the time), or render at very high resolution (which IIRC was 1280x1024 in that era).

Here's what Carmack said abotu the SGIs a few years before: """SGI Infinite reality: ($100000+) Fill rate from hell. Polygons from hell. If you don’t trip up on state changes, nothing will come within shouting distance of this system. You would expect that.""" SGI was also key for map builds before PCs were capable.

But yes, 1999-2000 was just around the cusp of when SGI went from "amazing" to "meh".