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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

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

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!