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> Sun seemed to be very aware of the problem and fought really hard, but they couldn't cut off Linux completely. Given how baffling Solaris x86 was as a produc

> Sun seemed to be very aware of the problem and fought really hard, but they couldn't cut off Linux completely. Given how baffling Solaris x86 was as a product (is it supported? is anyone at Sun taking it seriously? is hardware coming? are they all breathing swamp gas over there?) over the years to those of us who really wanted to like Solaris x86, this seems like a pretty generous comment. I think you're right about IBM. I don't know if they were the least poorly managed of the Unix vendors, but they had some real customers because of their mainframe business. They definitely deserve some credit for stretching Linux to that hardware.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
IBM wasn't the least poorly managed. It's just that they weren't a workstation vendor in the same sense. IBM had some Unix workstations, but that was never their core. Their core was mainframes. IBM could lose the Unix workstation business without blinking. Whereas Sun, SGI, etc., if they lost the Unix workstations, they were dead, because that was who they were.
- justin66 6y ago
  There was a time when it wasn't crazy to think that Sun might be able to survive on the basis of a strong server business. https://www.zdnet.com/article/server-sales-sun-wins-the-battle-but-ibm-the-war-5000114605/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/server-sales-sun-wins-the-batt... That was never really true of SGI.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Yeah. Sun wanted to be internet servers (along with workstations); SGI wanted to be render farms along with workstations. But internet servers were a lot bigger market than render farms. Which left SGI with the workstation business. I remember that some guy at SGI wrote an article titled "Pecked to death by ducks", that argued that SGI would never be done in by commodity hardware - that commodity hardware wasn't powerful enough, so it would be as absurd as being pecked to death by ducks. Then dual CPU machines came out, and so he wrote a sequel: "Pecked to death by ducks with two bills". In the end, though, SGI got pecked to death by 700-pound, 15-foot-tall ducks - the commodity hardware got better faster than SGI's did. But in the mid-to-late 90s, I loved SGI machines. Not by 2005, maybe, but in their day, they were great.
    - giantrobot 6y ago
      SGI's workstations offered tons of internal bandwidth that commodity PC hardware couldn't touch until the early 2000s. So for some things and during a certain era SGI didn't have meaningful competition. However the market for workstations that start at 50k is really tiny and saturated quickly. When the PC workstations with comparable I/O performance appeared and sold for half to a quarter of what SGI wanted, SGI was doomed.
      - justin66 6y ago
        > SGI's workstations offered tons of internal bandwidth that commodity PC hardware couldn't touch until the early 2000s. It's funny, there was a brief and very painful period where you could point to things SGI's hardware could still do better than everyone else, but it was a rapidly shrinking category of things and everyone could see they were doomed. It was made more painful by the totally ineffectual ways they attempted to save themselves. Proprietary NT hardware! Itanium! Totally random Linux stuff!

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

IBM wasn't the least poorly managed. It's just that they weren't a workstation vendor in the same sense. IBM had some Unix workstations, but that was never their core. Their core was mainframes. IBM could lose the Unix workstation business without blinking. Whereas Sun, SGI, etc., if they lost the Unix workstations, they were dead, because that was who they were.

justin66 6y ago
There was a time when it wasn't crazy to think that Sun might be able to survive on the basis of a strong server business. https://www.zdnet.com/article/server-sales-sun-wins-the-battle-but-ibm-the-war-5000114605/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/server-sales-sun-wins-the-batt... That was never really true of SGI.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Yeah. Sun wanted to be internet servers (along with workstations); SGI wanted to be render farms along with workstations. But internet servers were a lot bigger market than render farms. Which left SGI with the workstation business. I remember that some guy at SGI wrote an article titled "Pecked to death by ducks", that argued that SGI would never be done in by commodity hardware - that commodity hardware wasn't powerful enough, so it would be as absurd as being pecked to death by ducks. Then dual CPU machines came out, and so he wrote a sequel: "Pecked to death by ducks with two bills". In the end, though, SGI got pecked to death by 700-pound, 15-foot-tall ducks - the commodity hardware got better faster than SGI's did. But in the mid-to-late 90s, I loved SGI machines. Not by 2005, maybe, but in their day, they were great.
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    SGI's workstations offered tons of internal bandwidth that commodity PC hardware couldn't touch until the early 2000s. So for some things and during a certain era SGI didn't have meaningful competition. However the market for workstations that start at 50k is really tiny and saturated quickly. When the PC workstations with comparable I/O performance appeared and sold for half to a quarter of what SGI wanted, SGI was doomed.
    - justin66 6y ago
      > SGI's workstations offered tons of internal bandwidth that commodity PC hardware couldn't touch until the early 2000s. It's funny, there was a brief and very painful period where you could point to things SGI's hardware could still do better than everyone else, but it was a rapidly shrinking category of things and everyone could see they were doomed. It was made more painful by the totally ineffectual ways they attempted to save themselves. Proprietary NT hardware! Itanium! Totally random Linux stuff!