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Actually SGI were more or less destroyed by Linux too. I remember being in a meeting with them at the height of the dot com boom where we were told that they we
by iuguy 14y ago
Actually SGI were more or less destroyed by Linux too. I remember being in a meeting with them at the height of the dot com boom where we were told that they were embracing Linux for mid-range to replace lower-end IRIX systems. My colleagues and I came out of the meeting unable to understand why people would opt for x86 SGI hardware running Linux to run web servers at two to three times the cost of equivalent off the shelf x86 hardware running Linux to run web servers.
Sun could've learned a lot from SGI's demise but didn't, due to poor leadership (IMHO). I still remember Sun charging 5 times multiples of COTS x86 hardware for general web servers, and telling them that they were competing with x86 on price.
To be fair, Sun hardware was (again IMHO) very reliable and I did love it to bits.
- rdl 14y agoA lot of SGI's problems were self inflicted. They basically sucked for anything except awesome graphics cards on the mid to high end (I used to have a $200k Onyx in the group I undergrad-research-assistanted at media lab). The Indy and such were wretched. IRIX was actually worse than HP-UX; on par with AIX.
- fafner 14y agoWell Sun did learn from it. They started adopting x86 and Linux initially. But then they realised they'd only make themselves obsolete by this and stopped this. They released OpenSolaris to push Solaris against Linux. SGI had a lot of problems. I mean they even started selling Windows NT workstations at one point.