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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: 0.407s | 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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hintymad ◴[05 Apr 24 23:40 UTC] No.39948579[source]▶
I guess an interesting question would be whether Nvidia is SGI in the late 90s or Intel of 80s.
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1. geor9e ◴[06 Apr 24 01:46 UTC] No.39949304[source]▶
SGI was a pretty small 3D workstation company at the bottom of the S&P500, even at it's peak. Microsoft was at least a hundred times as big as SGI. (And Nvidia was even smaller, selling GPUs for both SGI worthstations and Windows PCs at the time.) Now Nvidia is a titan at #5 in the S&P. They could certainly be taken down a notch or two as CUDA alternatives mature and people start buying cheaper AMD/Intel/FPGA(groq, etc) hardware. But they're the best at what they do, with the best people. They don't really have a doomed business model the way SGI's "take out of a second mortage for the Onyx workstation to make N64 games" business model was doomed. I don't buy Nvidia stock, personally, but I especially wouldn't bet against them long term either.