Basically what the workstation companies did was sell capabilities that would be available years down the line at a premium with much better margins. The probl

Basically what the workstation companies did was sell capabilities that would be available years down the line at a premium with much better margins. The problem (for them) was that Wintel kept shrinking the gap. In 1981 they were selling stuff that PC's wouldn't have for 10-15 years. In 1991 they were selling stuff that PC's wouldn't have for 5 years. By 2001 they had been largely lapped on their core systems. Had a company like SGI managed to survive their business model would have likely remained the same[1]: they might have looked like a boutique nVidia selling extreme high-end parallelism solutions (i.e. graphics, neural net hardware etc) that GPU makers wouldn't yet be able to match with commodity hardware. Probably some combination of extreme transistor count and boatloads of FPGA/specialized silicon coupled with extreme power consumption and cooling. They also would have been able to go after smaller verticals than nVidia can. That was always their game: selling solutions that were relatively harder to produce because they had to be engineered and hadn't been commoditized yet. The problem is, those doing to the commoditizing can move faster than those doing the innovating. When those doing the innovating die off, the technology doesn't advance as quickly. [1] I say this because all of these companies seemed to have a similar fault: they were never able to move down market so that they could scale up their volumes. The same thing is slowly killing Intel right now.