8 ms·

Yup, remember when they "teamed up" with SGI to create "Farenheit"? Embrace, extend, extinguish...

by wazoox 4y ago

pjmlp 4y ago
As if SGI didn't had their share in Farenheit's failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(graphics_API) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(graphics_API)
- wazoox 4y ago
  Holy cow I found a nest of Microsoft fans. From your link: > By 1999 it was clear that Microsoft had no intention of delivering Low Level; although officially working on it, almost no resources were dedicated to actually producing code. No kidding... Also the CEO of SGI in the late 90s was an ex-Microsoft and bet heavily on weird technical choices (remember the SGI 320 / 540? I do) that played no small role in sinking the boat. Extremely similar to the infamous Nokia suicide in the 2010s under another Microsoft alumni. I think the similarity isn't due to chance.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    >infamous Nokia suicide Nokia would had killed itself either way, with Elop it still tried to flop. Every Nokia fanboy cries about EEE, but blissfully forgets what a turd was 5800 Xpress Music, which came half a year later than iPhone 3G.
    - Nursie 4y ago
      Nokia was massive outside of the US, it had name recognition bigger than apple in Europe even in 2009 and still pumped out some gems like the N900. Yes it had huge systemic issues. Structural problems, too many departments pumping out too many phones with overlapping feature sets, and an incoherent platform strategy. But Elop flat-out murdered it with his burning platforms memo and then flogged the scraps to the mothership. It came across as a stitch-up from the word go.
      - justsomehnguy 4y ago
        By 2009 writing was on the wall and it wasn't 'Nokia'. You know why it was 'Xpress Music'? Because Nokia was years late for a 'music phone'. Even Moto had E398 and SE had both music and photo. By 2009 Nokia had a cheap line-up for the brand zealots (eaten up by Moto C-series and everyone else), a couple of fetishist's phones (remember those with floral pattern and 8800?) and.. overpriced 'commucators' with subpar internals (hell, late PDAs on Xscale had more RAM and CPU power) and incompatible with anything, including themselves, mess of Symbian. Elop not only allowed MS to try the waters with mobiles, but actually saved many, many workplaces for years. Alternative for that would had been a bankrupcy around 2013.
        Nursie 4y ago
        That's some pretty revisionist history IMHO. By 2009 the company was in the shit, but it had money and market share. > Alternative for that would had been a bankrupcy around 2013. The alternative would have been some restructuring by someone with a better idea than crashing the company and selling the name to his real bosses at MS. The company was in trouble but salvageable. Elop flat-out murdered it, and it looked a lot like he did it to try to get a name brand for MS to use for its windows phones, which were failing badly (and continued to do so).
        justsomehnguy 4y ago
        > The company was in trouble but salvageable. No. You should re-read that memo, specifically starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent." paragraph. In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for Symbian[0] - who would bother with all the Symbian shenanigans when even Nokia itself said what it would move to MeeGo 'soon', along with ~10% of smartphone market? Money was in Apple and Android. To be salvageable you need something in demand on the market and Nokia only had a brand. You can't salvage an 18-wheeler running off the cliff. Personally, I had a displeasure of trying to do something on colleague's N8 somewhere in 2011-2012. Not only it was slow as molasses but most of the apps which relied on Ovi were nonfunctional. Insightful tidbit from N8 wiki page: > At the time of its launch in November 2010 the Nokia N8 came with the "Comes With Music" service (also branded "Ovi Music Unlimited") in selected markets. In January 2011, Nokia stopped offering the Ovi Music Unlimited service in 27 of the 33 countries where it was offered. So popular and salvageable what they discontinued the service 3 months after the launch? Should I remind you what Elop's memo was a month later, in February 2011? [0] Yep, this is what really killed WP too - lack of the momentum on the start, inability to persuade Instagram to bake the app for WP, falling integrations (whey worked at the start! Then Facebook decided it doesn't want to be integrated anywhere because everyone should use their app) => declining market share => lack of interest from developers => declining market share => lack of...
    - dagmx 4y ago
      Yeah, definitely agreed. RiM basically killed off a big chunk of the Nokia market, as it did for Windows CE as well. By the time the original iPhone came out, Nokia hadn’t really put out anything to capture the mindshare in a while. They were severely hampered by the split of their Symbian lineup (S30,40,60,90) and unable to adapt to the newest iteration of smartphones. They’d never have been able to adapt to compete without throwing out Symbian, which they held on to and tried to reinvent. Then there was the failure of MeeGo. Nokia would have been in the same spot they’re in today regardless of Microsoft. They’d be just another (sadly) washed up Android phone brand. Just like their biggest competitors at the time: Sony Ericsson and Motorola. But at least we got a lot of Qt development out of it.
    - to11mtm 4y ago
      I'm a Nokia fanboy and will sadly admit that you're right. They made a -lot- of stupid decisions, both in sticking to 'what they knew' and bad decisions with cutting-edge tech (N900 comes to mind, you couldn't get one in the states with the right bands for 3G). I will always love the Lumia cameras however, even their shit tier models had great image quality.
      - asveikau 4y ago
        I had an n900 on 3g on T-Mobile USA. They should have continued maemo 5 and bet hard on it. The big rewrites for n9, and continued focus on symbian as a cash cow, hurt them.
  - pinewurst 4y ago
    Don’t attribute to malice that which can be can be attributed to stupidity. My current employer has fairly recently hired a ton of ex-Google/Microsoft into upper management. They’re universally clueless about our business, spending most of their time trying to shiv one another for power.
    - sidlls 4y ago
      We've recently hired a bunch of ex-Googlers (as well as Twitter-ers and other laid off people). They seem to spend most of their time making sure everyone here knows they're ex-${big_name} and how awesome things were there and we should change everything to do it the same way. It's a bit of a put-off.
      - pinewurst 4y ago
        If one thinks about it, they were minions in a monopoly, and a pretty dysfunctional one at that even if lucrative. What the heck do they know about how to run a competitive business?
      - ido 4y ago
        Is this not visible to the people with authority to fire them/not hire more such people? Or do they think differently than you?
        aflag 4y ago
        People are not usually fired for being obnoxious.
        ido 4y ago
        It sound like the person we're replying too implied they were also not very effective at their jobs.
        aflag 4y ago
        I'd be surprised if he really spent most of his time repeating that he worked at Google. That's certainly hyperbole.
  - nix23 4y ago
    > Holy cow I found a nest of Microsoft fans. From your link: It's not a nest, he's is mostly the only one.
  - Keyframe 4y ago
    TBH SGI 320/540, well namely Cobalt were rather interesting tech-wise. Not sure if they could've gone against Microsoft at the time (NT/Softimage for example) and rise of OpenGL2 (with 3dlabs and all).
    - wazoox 4y ago
      Yeah, they were really interesting machines but there were lots of weird technical choices : the non-PC EPROM that made them incompatible with any other OS than a special release of Windows 2000, the 3.3V PCI slots (at the time incompatible with 95% of available cards), the weird connector for the SGI 1600 screen... making the whole idea of "going Intel to conquer a larger market" moot from the start. Of course the main crime of the ex-Microsoft boss as the time wasn't that, but selling out most of SGI's IP to Microsoft and nVidia for some quick money.
      - Keyframe 4y ago
        Yeah, but that's SGI doing SGI things basically. They were used to daylight robbery systems they had ultimate control over. This is nothing out of ordinary from their thinking. The weird thinking was more if you're doing a PC do a PC then, not this.. but maybe they initially didn't want to - doing an SGI workstation with PC components is more like it. They'd be shown by the market ultimately it's not what it wants. Primary cool thing about it in my opinion was cobalt and cpu aharing RAM, but what was weird about it was distribution of how much CPU gets and how much GPU was not dynamic but rather static which you had to set up manually before boot. Dynamic sharing is what only now Apple is doing. Something AMD also explored if you had their vertical (cpu, mobo, gpu) but only for fast path movement of data. I'd like to see more of that.
        wazoox 4y ago
        The shared memory architecture came directly from the SGI O2 in 1996. The O2 had dynamic sharing, but it was impossible to make it work in Windows. O2 dynamic memory sharing allowed things impossible on all other machines with its infinite texture memory, like mapping several videos seamlessly on moving 3D objects (also thanks to the built-in MJPEG encoding/decoding hardware).
jbverschoor 4y ago
I have the beta cds here.. Fahrenheit / XSG. One disk died though
astrange 4y ago
My "favorite" Microsoft fact is that DirectX and Xbox were codenamed Manhattan and Midway because Microsoft's gaming division just ran on "what codename would be the most racist towards Japanese people?". The dxdiag icon is an X because it was originally the radiation symbol! And this tradition is carried on to this day in milder form when Western game devs hear Elden Ring is more popular than their game or try to "fix" visual novels and JRPGs without playing any of them.

Yup, remember when they "teamed up" with SGI to create "Farenheit"? Embrace, extend, extinguish...

by wazoox 4y ago

Yup, remember when they "teamed up" with SGI to create "Farenheit"? Embrace, extend, extinguish...

As if SGI didn't had their share in Farenheit's failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(graphics_API) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(graphics_API)

wazoox 4y ago
Holy cow I found a nest of Microsoft fans. From your link: > By 1999 it was clear that Microsoft had no intention of delivering Low Level; although officially working on it, almost no resources were dedicated to actually producing code. No kidding... Also the CEO of SGI in the late 90s was an ex-Microsoft and bet heavily on weird technical choices (remember the SGI 320 / 540? I do) that played no small role in sinking the boat. Extremely similar to the infamous Nokia suicide in the 2010s under another Microsoft alumni. I think the similarity isn't due to chance.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  >infamous Nokia suicide Nokia would had killed itself either way, with Elop it still tried to flop. Every Nokia fanboy cries about EEE, but blissfully forgets what a turd was 5800 Xpress Music, which came half a year later than iPhone 3G.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    Nokia was massive outside of the US, it had name recognition bigger than apple in Europe even in 2009 and still pumped out some gems like the N900. Yes it had huge systemic issues. Structural problems, too many departments pumping out too many phones with overlapping feature sets, and an incoherent platform strategy. But Elop flat-out murdered it with his burning platforms memo and then flogged the scraps to the mothership. It came across as a stitch-up from the word go.
    - justsomehnguy 4y ago
      By 2009 writing was on the wall and it wasn't 'Nokia'. You know why it was 'Xpress Music'? Because Nokia was years late for a 'music phone'. Even Moto had E398 and SE had both music and photo. By 2009 Nokia had a cheap line-up for the brand zealots (eaten up by Moto C-series and everyone else), a couple of fetishist's phones (remember those with floral pattern and 8800?) and.. overpriced 'commucators' with subpar internals (hell, late PDAs on Xscale had more RAM and CPU power) and incompatible with anything, including themselves, mess of Symbian. Elop not only allowed MS to try the waters with mobiles, but actually saved many, many workplaces for years. Alternative for that would had been a bankrupcy around 2013.
      - Nursie 4y ago
        That's some pretty revisionist history IMHO. By 2009 the company was in the shit, but it had money and market share. > Alternative for that would had been a bankrupcy around 2013. The alternative would have been some restructuring by someone with a better idea than crashing the company and selling the name to his real bosses at MS. The company was in trouble but salvageable. Elop flat-out murdered it, and it looked a lot like he did it to try to get a name brand for MS to use for its windows phones, which were failing badly (and continued to do so).
        justsomehnguy 4y ago
        > The company was in trouble but salvageable. No. You should re-read that memo, specifically starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent." paragraph. In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for Symbian[0] - who would bother with all the Symbian shenanigans when even Nokia itself said what it would move to MeeGo 'soon', along with ~10% of smartphone market? Money was in Apple and Android. To be salvageable you need something in demand on the market and Nokia only had a brand. You can't salvage an 18-wheeler running off the cliff. Personally, I had a displeasure of trying to do something on colleague's N8 somewhere in 2011-2012. Not only it was slow as molasses but most of the apps which relied on Ovi were nonfunctional. Insightful tidbit from N8 wiki page: > At the time of its launch in November 2010 the Nokia N8 came with the "Comes With Music" service (also branded "Ovi Music Unlimited") in selected markets. In January 2011, Nokia stopped offering the Ovi Music Unlimited service in 27 of the 33 countries where it was offered. So popular and salvageable what they discontinued the service 3 months after the launch? Should I remind you what Elop's memo was a month later, in February 2011? [0] Yep, this is what really killed WP too - lack of the momentum on the start, inability to persuade Instagram to bake the app for WP, falling integrations (whey worked at the start! Then Facebook decided it doesn't want to be integrated anywhere because everyone should use their app) => declining market share => lack of interest from developers => declining market share => lack of...
  - dagmx 4y ago
    Yeah, definitely agreed. RiM basically killed off a big chunk of the Nokia market, as it did for Windows CE as well. By the time the original iPhone came out, Nokia hadn’t really put out anything to capture the mindshare in a while. They were severely hampered by the split of their Symbian lineup (S30,40,60,90) and unable to adapt to the newest iteration of smartphones. They’d never have been able to adapt to compete without throwing out Symbian, which they held on to and tried to reinvent. Then there was the failure of MeeGo. Nokia would have been in the same spot they’re in today regardless of Microsoft. They’d be just another (sadly) washed up Android phone brand. Just like their biggest competitors at the time: Sony Ericsson and Motorola. But at least we got a lot of Qt development out of it.
  - to11mtm 4y ago
    I'm a Nokia fanboy and will sadly admit that you're right. They made a -lot- of stupid decisions, both in sticking to 'what they knew' and bad decisions with cutting-edge tech (N900 comes to mind, you couldn't get one in the states with the right bands for 3G). I will always love the Lumia cameras however, even their shit tier models had great image quality.
    - asveikau 4y ago
      I had an n900 on 3g on T-Mobile USA. They should have continued maemo 5 and bet hard on it. The big rewrites for n9, and continued focus on symbian as a cash cow, hurt them.
- pinewurst 4y ago
  Don’t attribute to malice that which can be can be attributed to stupidity. My current employer has fairly recently hired a ton of ex-Google/Microsoft into upper management. They’re universally clueless about our business, spending most of their time trying to shiv one another for power.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    We've recently hired a bunch of ex-Googlers (as well as Twitter-ers and other laid off people). They seem to spend most of their time making sure everyone here knows they're ex-${big_name} and how awesome things were there and we should change everything to do it the same way. It's a bit of a put-off.
    - pinewurst 4y ago
      If one thinks about it, they were minions in a monopoly, and a pretty dysfunctional one at that even if lucrative. What the heck do they know about how to run a competitive business?
    - ido 4y ago
      Is this not visible to the people with authority to fire them/not hire more such people? Or do they think differently than you?
      - aflag 4y ago
        People are not usually fired for being obnoxious.
        ido 4y ago
        It sound like the person we're replying too implied they were also not very effective at their jobs.
        aflag 4y ago
        I'd be surprised if he really spent most of his time repeating that he worked at Google. That's certainly hyperbole.
- nix23 4y ago
  > Holy cow I found a nest of Microsoft fans. From your link: It's not a nest, he's is mostly the only one.
- Keyframe 4y ago
  TBH SGI 320/540, well namely Cobalt were rather interesting tech-wise. Not sure if they could've gone against Microsoft at the time (NT/Softimage for example) and rise of OpenGL2 (with 3dlabs and all).
  - wazoox 4y ago
    Yeah, they were really interesting machines but there were lots of weird technical choices : the non-PC EPROM that made them incompatible with any other OS than a special release of Windows 2000, the 3.3V PCI slots (at the time incompatible with 95% of available cards), the weird connector for the SGI 1600 screen... making the whole idea of "going Intel to conquer a larger market" moot from the start. Of course the main crime of the ex-Microsoft boss as the time wasn't that, but selling out most of SGI's IP to Microsoft and nVidia for some quick money.
    - Keyframe 4y ago
      Yeah, but that's SGI doing SGI things basically. They were used to daylight robbery systems they had ultimate control over. This is nothing out of ordinary from their thinking. The weird thinking was more if you're doing a PC do a PC then, not this.. but maybe they initially didn't want to - doing an SGI workstation with PC components is more like it. They'd be shown by the market ultimately it's not what it wants. Primary cool thing about it in my opinion was cobalt and cpu aharing RAM, but what was weird about it was distribution of how much CPU gets and how much GPU was not dynamic but rather static which you had to set up manually before boot. Dynamic sharing is what only now Apple is doing. Something AMD also explored if you had their vertical (cpu, mobo, gpu) but only for fast path movement of data. I'd like to see more of that.
      - wazoox 4y ago
        The shared memory architecture came directly from the SGI O2 in 1996. The O2 had dynamic sharing, but it was impossible to make it work in Windows. O2 dynamic memory sharing allowed things impossible on all other machines with its infinite texture memory, like mapping several videos seamlessly on moving 3D objects (also thanks to the built-in MJPEG encoding/decoding hardware).

jbverschoor 4y ago

I have the beta cds here.. Fahrenheit / XSG. One disk died though

astrange 4y ago

My "favorite" Microsoft fact is that DirectX and Xbox were codenamed Manhattan and Midway because Microsoft's gaming division just ran on "what codename would be the most racist towards Japanese people?". The dxdiag icon is an X because it was originally the radiation symbol! And this tradition is carried on to this day in milder form when Western game devs hear Elden Ring is more popular than their game or try to "fix" visual novels and JRPGs without playing any of them.