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The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

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346 points BirAdam | 1 comments | 05 Apr 24 16:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.358s | source
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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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ghaff ◴[05 Apr 24 18:25 UTC] No.39945479[source]▶
Having worked longtime for a minicomputer company--which actually survived longer than most mostly because of some storage innovations along with some high-end Unix initiatives--it's really hard. You can't really kick a huge existing business to the curb. Or otherwise say we're going to largely start over.

Kodak was not actually in a position to be big in digital. And, of course, the digital camera manufacturers mostly got eclipsed by smartphones anyway a decade or so later.

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loloquwowndueo ◴[05 Apr 24 18:34 UTC] No.39945560[source]▶
Data General?
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ghaff ◴[05 Apr 24 18:47 UTC] No.39945698[source]▶
Yes. CLARiiON eventually enabled a sale to EMC (which arguably saved EMC for a time) and the Unix business (especially NUMA servers) were sufficient revenue producers for a while to keep the lights on. ThinLiiNe (or whatever the capitalization was) never went anywhere but neither did a lot of things in the dot.com era.
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1. panick21_ ◴[06 Apr 24 01:13 UTC] No.39949122[source]▶
Seems like Sun really shot itself in the foot by not buying DataGeneral. A Unix storage business that fits pretty well with their larger datacenter portfolio. And a start to a real x86 business.

I just finished reading 'LIFE UNDER THE SUN: My 20-Year Journey at Sun Microsystems' that talks about Sun and the storage businesses a bit. Sun was never happy with how well they did in storage. Sun was part of defining Fibre Channel.

For some reason that still doesn't make sense to they bought StorageTek for an incredible $4 billion at the time when Sun wasn't exactly flying high. The explanation from the CEO given in the book mentioned above is baffling.

Edit:

Seems they bought:

1999: MAXSTRAT Corporation, a company in Milpitas, California selling Fibre Channel storage servers.

Never heard of them. Not sure how comparable it was.