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I remember when SGI (Silicon Graphics) paid a bunch of money to rebrand to . . . drumroll . . . SGI! The consultants must have been high-fiving each other afte

by kabdib 4y ago

I remember when SGI (Silicon Graphics) paid a bunch of money to rebrand to . . . drumroll . . . SGI! The consultants must have been high-fiving each other after that one landed, it's like trading in your car only to find that the saleswoman has sold you your own car back, at a profit. (SGI later collapsed due to "Corporate Campus Syndrome", and other companies, including Google, now occupy the wacky buildings they spent even more money on. It's kind of like a higher order of hermit crab).

jonathanyc 4y ago
TIL Google occupies SGI's former headquarters. A college professor mentioned working for SGI, so I knew they existed and had importance, but I didn't realize their business had collapsed.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  The workstation market got undercut by the improving performance of intel PCs with accelerators from companies like 3D Labs. There's plenty you could criticize SGI management for, but all the unix workstation vendors ended up getting pushed out by that in the end. SGI continued on for a bit selling supercomputers, as they had some multiprocessor interconnect technology that was good for its time. But that got spun out as SGI died, and is now the Cray division of HP. It's sad what happened to them, as in their prime they really were a category of their own.
  - kabdib 4y ago
    SGI had some seriously cool tech that they could charge a premium for, then $300 3D graphics cards for PCs came out and ate their lunch (around the time that Windows NT was basically destroying the Unix workstation market). I remember sneaking over to their cafeteria, from the Landings office park across the street (where I did stints at some startups). They didn't bother to check badges. I met up with a bunch of old cow-orkers from Apple and just kind of hemmed and hawed when they asked what group I was in. :-) But the lessons are clear: Watch your competitors carefully, and don't build a stupid corporate campus because the gods simply hate that kind of hubris.
- LanceH 4y ago
  They were one of the contenders in the early days of the web as everyone was trying to get bigger web servers, rather than numerous commodity web servers that we have today. They built single big machines and gave away the best swag. The leather jacket, in particular, was coveted.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
blowski 4y ago
A university in the UK (Portsmouth?) hired an expensive creative agency to come up with a new name. They whittled it down to three options: * University of Portsmouth * The University of Portsmouth * Portsmouth University
- willcipriano 4y ago
  The reason I'm not allowed in polite circles is after they present those 3 options, I'd laugh, compliment the great joke and ask them when the real presentation was going to begin.
- torstenvl 4y ago
  Is "pee ew" a slang interjection indicating that something stinks in British English like it is in American English?
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Always got to watch those acronyms. Reminds me of back in the day when Oregon State started advertising its website on billboards. www.orst.edu. [1] Nobody in their marketing department managed to see that before the rest of the world quickly started making fun of it. They quickly rebranded to www.oregonstate.edu. [1] Yes, that's not -exactly- an acronym
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Orst for Oregon State is technically an acronym: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym It's not an initialism, like IBM, but it is an acronym, like Benelux.
- kuschkufan 4y ago
  Yeah, so a couple years back the "Technische Universität Berlin" rebranded to "Berlin Universität der Technologie" or Berlin University of Technology. Because they thought that would be more similar to e.g. MIT and the like. Of course the abbreviation then would be BUT... Thankfully it did not stick and they are back to Technical University of Berlin.
virtualritz 4y ago
Usually a logo/rebrand change keeps the name. So no real suprise. That said, SGI had an iconic logo of a cube formed from a single periodic pipe before. I was using SGIs daily at the time and I almost cried when they did the rebrand. The rebrand replaced it with a contemporary (at the time, mind you) typography logo that would look outdated if the compamy still existed. To their credit, the rebrand did include a typeface design for use with all their design, i.e. detached from the logo. The resp. fonts would have the aforementioned issues though -- one variant was used for the logo which is kinda cheap. But at least they had a tyepface designed and it was recognizable. That rarely happens. Commonly a rebrand will just swap the old typeface for something different but already existing.
- Someone 4y ago
  > That said, SGI had an iconic logo of a cube formed from a single periodic pipe before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#/media/File%3ASilicon_Graphics_logo.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#/media/File%3... Rebranded in 1999, according to Wikipedia. I would think the old logo looked really bad on the web at the time, with monitors being 640 × 480 at 256 colors, if you were lucky. It also would have been expensive to reproduce well on letterhead, and I wouldn’t dare think of how that looked on photocopies (often monochrome at the time) Now, could they have stylized/simplified the old logo and keep it nice? I wouldn’t know.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    > Rebranded in 1999, according to Wikipedia. I would think the old logo looked really bad on the web at the time, with monitors being 640 × 480 at 256 colors, if you were lucky. Now this is just silly. By 1999 most web users had at least True Color displays at SVGA if not XGA. While VGA resolutions with 256 colors were a design consideration those users were not the norm. With that said, the old SGI looked just fine even at 256 colors. The shape was distinctive and it was all grayscale so 256 color palettes had all the colors needed for the logo with little noticeable dithering. There were even good 1-bit versions that were very distinctive.
  - cobalt 4y ago
Eduard 4y ago
Corporate Campus Syndrome?

by kabdib 4y ago

jonathanyc 4y ago

TIL Google occupies SGI's former headquarters. A college professor mentioned working for SGI, so I knew they existed and had importance, but I didn't realize their business had collapsed.

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
The workstation market got undercut by the improving performance of intel PCs with accelerators from companies like 3D Labs. There's plenty you could criticize SGI management for, but all the unix workstation vendors ended up getting pushed out by that in the end. SGI continued on for a bit selling supercomputers, as they had some multiprocessor interconnect technology that was good for its time. But that got spun out as SGI died, and is now the Cray division of HP. It's sad what happened to them, as in their prime they really were a category of their own.
- kabdib 4y ago
  SGI had some seriously cool tech that they could charge a premium for, then $300 3D graphics cards for PCs came out and ate their lunch (around the time that Windows NT was basically destroying the Unix workstation market). I remember sneaking over to their cafeteria, from the Landings office park across the street (where I did stints at some startups). They didn't bother to check badges. I met up with a bunch of old cow-orkers from Apple and just kind of hemmed and hawed when they asked what group I was in. :-) But the lessons are clear: Watch your competitors carefully, and don't build a stupid corporate campus because the gods simply hate that kind of hubris.
LanceH 4y ago
They were one of the contenders in the early days of the web as everyone was trying to get bigger web servers, rather than numerous commodity web servers that we have today. They built single big machines and gave away the best swag. The leather jacket, in particular, was coveted.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

blowski 4y ago

A university in the UK (Portsmouth?) hired an expensive creative agency to come up with a new name. They whittled it down to three options: * University of Portsmouth * The University of Portsmouth * Portsmouth University

willcipriano 4y ago
The reason I'm not allowed in polite circles is after they present those 3 options, I'd laugh, compliment the great joke and ask them when the real presentation was going to begin.
torstenvl 4y ago
Is "pee ew" a slang interjection indicating that something stinks in British English like it is in American English?
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Always got to watch those acronyms. Reminds me of back in the day when Oregon State started advertising its website on billboards. www.orst.edu. [1] Nobody in their marketing department managed to see that before the rest of the world quickly started making fun of it. They quickly rebranded to www.oregonstate.edu. [1] Yes, that's not -exactly- an acronym
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Orst for Oregon State is technically an acronym: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym It's not an initialism, like IBM, but it is an acronym, like Benelux.
kuschkufan 4y ago
Yeah, so a couple years back the "Technische Universität Berlin" rebranded to "Berlin Universität der Technologie" or Berlin University of Technology. Because they thought that would be more similar to e.g. MIT and the like. Of course the abbreviation then would be BUT... Thankfully it did not stick and they are back to Technical University of Berlin.

virtualritz 4y ago

Usually a logo/rebrand change keeps the name. So no real suprise. That said, SGI had an iconic logo of a cube formed from a single periodic pipe before. I was using SGIs daily at the time and I almost cried when they did the rebrand. The rebrand replaced it with a contemporary (at the time, mind you) typography logo that would look outdated if the compamy still existed. To their credit, the rebrand did include a typeface design for use with all their design, i.e. detached from the logo. The resp. fonts would have the aforementioned issues though -- one variant was used for the logo which is kinda cheap. But at least they had a tyepface designed and it was recognizable. That rarely happens. Commonly a rebrand will just swap the old typeface for something different but already existing.

Someone 4y ago
> That said, SGI had an iconic logo of a cube formed from a single periodic pipe before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#/media/File%3ASilicon_Graphics_logo.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#/media/File%3... Rebranded in 1999, according to Wikipedia. I would think the old logo looked really bad on the web at the time, with monitors being 640 × 480 at 256 colors, if you were lucky. It also would have been expensive to reproduce well on letterhead, and I wouldn’t dare think of how that looked on photocopies (often monochrome at the time) Now, could they have stylized/simplified the old logo and keep it nice? I wouldn’t know.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > Rebranded in 1999, according to Wikipedia. I would think the old logo looked really bad on the web at the time, with monitors being 640 × 480 at 256 colors, if you were lucky. Now this is just silly. By 1999 most web users had at least True Color displays at SVGA if not XGA. While VGA resolutions with 256 colors were a design consideration those users were not the norm. With that said, the old SGI looked just fine even at 256 colors. The shape was distinctive and it was all grayscale so 256 color palettes had all the colors needed for the logo with little noticeable dithering. There were even good 1-bit versions that were very distinctive.
- cobalt 4y ago

Eduard 4y ago

Corporate Campus Syndrome?