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The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

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346 points BirAdam | 3 comments | 05 Apr 24 16:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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VelesDude ◴[05 Apr 24 19:39 UTC] No.39946264[source]▶
It was clear they were trying to do more consumer grade things, just look at the N64. Couldn't get more mainstream than that. Seeing how the graphics market ended up, it looks obvious from here but in the mid 90's it was still the wild west and everybody was throwing mud at the wall seeing what would stick.

I have never really said that they where "taken by surprise", but a part of it felt like (from the outside) that management had been a little blinded by their pass success and the profit margins from their workstations combined with no clear path forwards for the whole industry. Nvidia could have very easily been just a curiosity of the past but they managed to strike it lucky standing on the shoulders of others.

If SGI had always been a company that could provide graphics workstations the worked with x86/Windows PC's early for example - maybe they would have fared better. Would have gone with the flow of technology at the time rather than fighting uphill no matter the potential technical brilliance. But being saddled to their MIPS processors and custom OS meant that once people left, they almost never came back. One can have the best tech and still fail.

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rbanffy ◴[05 Apr 24 22:21 UTC] No.39947985[source]▶
> provide graphics workstations the worked with x86/Windows PC's

Integraph started making PCs with high-end graphics at one point, when they abandoned CLIX and gave up on their (Fairchild's, really) Clipper processor. It didn't work for them either. SGI did their own "Visual Workstation" that ran Windows and had a Pentium, but that too was a huge disappointment.

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1. coredog64 ◴[06 Apr 24 04:31 UTC] No.39949969[source]▶
The 320 and 540 had a few nice things going for them: You could option them with the same 1600SW monitor that the higher-end O2 workstations used without having to use the fiddly multilink. SGI paid Microsoft for a HAL license and did a better job with multiprocessor than what you got from installing the vanilla version.
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2. timc3 ◴[06 Apr 24 06:26 UTC] No.39950457[source]▶
They had decent bandwidth internally allowing them to playback uncompressed realtime standard definition video which normal PCs running Windows couldn’t do at the time.
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3. rbanffy ◴[06 Apr 24 11:52 UTC] No.39951819[source]▶
The moment your product runs Windows, it'll compete with thousands of others. Being able to do one single thing better than the others won't help you much unless that one single thing can drive all your sales.

Even for video rendering, if your box is twice as fast, it'll be outcompeted by machines that cost half as much or less. At times my desktop PC was not fast enough, it was simpler to get another PC and run time-consuming things on it while I did other things on the other.