6 ms·

Silicon Graphics Declares Bankruptcy and Sells Itself For $25 Million

65 points by drm237 18y ago

access_denied 18y ago
Giving up IRIX for WinNT? Well. Death to the unbelievers I say. I never forgot the shock when they had those ads with ther PeeCees in the computer magazines. Up until that point SGI and SUN where kind of the good guys to me. Now, how could they have done it differently? I'd say: build up the lead in gaming consoles and developer workstations they had ad the time. IRIX/MIPS had also some technical advantages over Linux-Clusters in some niches like military simulations. They could have become some sort of NVidia in our days. Does any one has a more qualified strategy / commentary about SGI's demise in the markets to offer? Thanks.
- donw 18y ago
  Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but were I SGI, back when PCs had just started getting to the point of running true 3D games, I would have had the company enter the graphics-card market. The SGI name could have easily carried a premium price-tag, and could have provided a compelling upgrade line for customers when PCs just didn't cut the mustard any longer. This would have also let SGI position themselves to sell Maya across-the-board, giving them yet another solid revenue stream, and could have also let them jump into the console market, becoming the graphics vendor that powered the PlayStation, Sega Genesis, and so on.
  - bbgm 18y ago
    Well in a way that's what happened, but that company was Nvidia not SGI, since many of their folks left to join NVidia.
- sgoraya 18y ago
  SGI clearly had the cutting edge graphics technology and hardware - In my mind, the 3D video cards killed them very quickly and made SGI obsolete. As you may recall, when the 3Dfx Voodoo's were hitting the market, SGI did nothing at all, thinking that they still had the market cornered. Then came ATI, Creative, Nvidia etc. Back then there was the delineation between 'gaming' video cards and 'workstation' video cards, the latter having the premium price. SGI could have positioned themselves in both areas, especially the workstation cards. It was a classic case of a large, entrenched, slow moving company getting thwarted by startups. Too slow or unwilling to act / react...
  - dangoldin 18y ago
    Part of it may have been that they didn't want to cannibalize their current business so didn't really know what to do. At that time the 3d cards were low end and not a direct threat. A great example of the "Innovator's Dilemma"
  - samlittlewood 18y ago
    It seems a pretty good example of how important talent is vs. the shingle outside the door. 3dfx was founded by ex. SGI talent - Gary Tarolli, Ross Smith and Scott Sellers. (Garry Tarolli wrote dogfight)
iamelgringo 18y ago
There's probably young-uns here who don't know who Silicon Graphics is or what they did. Silicon Graphics sold proprietary unix systems that were very heavily optimized for doing graphics rendering. Their workstations sold from $10,000 on the low end to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were expensive, but if you wanted to do real time 3D stuff for animation, visual effects, CAD applications, or any type of graphics modelling, they were the only game in town, and you pretty much had to use their boxes. Their products were amazing in their time, and they pushed the state of the art in computer graphics hardware for years. But, between the ability to create relatively cheap linux based render farms with commodity hardware on the server side, and ATI/NVidia creating great plug in graphics cards for PC's/Workstations, SGI wasn't able to compete. They slowly died and faded away into obsolescence. Some of the last remnants of their technology that people interact with frequently is the OpenGL api. Silicon Graphics, you will be missed.
- bbgm 18y ago
  I spent most of grad school with one Octane on top of my desk (my primary machine) and a second one under my desk. Beautifully engineered, rock solid and great for their time. But SGI's steps post about 1998 were just crazy. Windows boxes with no software, a failure to realize how powerful linux systems were going to get, and losing their OpenGL team to NVidia. Will certainly be missed.
- aston 18y ago
  Further tying the past to the present, Google now inhabits the offices that SGI had to leave behind as their business declined. As far as I can tell, Google kept the old building numbers, too, which explains why the first building Google moved into were numbered in the forties.
- sgoraya 18y ago
  Great summary- I fondly recall my indigo2 workstation + 19 inch monitor, that weighed like a 100 lbs and was about 2ft. deep :) As time went on, our graveyard of SGI machines in the company attic grew and grew... OpenGL - wondrous technology back then and even now - Im getting nostalgic remembering the OpenGL vs. DirectX wars/discussions we had in the office.
patrickg-zill 18y ago
SGI killed themselves, just took a long time to die. They had geniuses working in their graphics side, and when they decided some 15 years ago that "Unix was dead" and WinNT was the future, those geniuses left for Nvidia and other places. SGI never recovered and ended up reselling supercomputers with ATI cards in them.
- biohacker42 18y ago
  For what it's worth, MS bought the companies that made a lot of the killer apps for SGI and ported them to Windows-only. It wasn't pure suicide, Microsoft helped.
  - Andys 18y ago
    "It wasn't pure suicide, Microsoft helped." A common theme running through the history of the industry.
  - slackerIII 18y ago
    Which companies/products were those?
    - Keyframe 18y ago
      Softimage for example - once they have done the port to WINNT and showed the world it can be done on that platform they have sold Softimage to AVID - which recently sold it to, where all good applications die, Autodesk (Microsoft in shadows)
- Tamerlin 18y ago
  SGI didn't switch to NT they switched to Linux. Their Columbia supercomputer isn't a Windows machine, it's a Linux machine.
  - bbgm 18y ago
    Oh they tried NT. Even played with one of those machines. They even looked ugly. They do a lot of Linux now, and have been playing with hybrid architectures. Another bet of theirs that failed were their Altix systems since the Itanium went nowhere fast
ComputerGuru 18y ago
I assume the 25MM value is in the patents and research?
- jwilliams 18y ago
  Not really. It looks like they are carrying a considerably amount of debt (half a billion). They list their assets at some $100 million below that. I'd be surprised if a lot of the core patents/IP hasn't already been sold off.
known 18y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Template_Library http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Template_Library
- access_denied 18y ago
  Thanks for the link. Can you add some context for why you think this is relevant ot the topic?
  - amitt 18y ago
    the C++ STL library was based off of the header based standard developed at SGI. So if you've used STL before in C++, you're building off the work that came out of SGI.
    - bd 18y ago
      Oh memories, I remember spending a lot of time here: http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl (SGI's STL documentation)
zandorg 18y ago
And Jim Clark 'marries' while ROM burns.
jballanc 18y ago
Damn, SGI is right there with Digital in the category of amazing companies that brought us amazing advances and didn't deserver the fate that befell them. ...looks like Sun might be the next member of that club...
iamwil 18y ago
I worked there as an intern back in 2000. I did chip circuit verification, and saw that they had roadmaps for their future products up to around 2006. The group I was in was designing server chips and their interconnects to make clusters of high performance super computers. I recall that they knew Intel was making dual and quadcore chips that would kill what they were doing, but had no solution how to turn the ship around. It's too bad. There were some solid engineers there, especially the ones that came from Cray.
joshu 18y ago
Anyone know WHY? What are they paying 600m for?

65 points by drm237 18y ago

Giving up IRIX for WinNT? Well. Death to the unbelievers I say. I never forgot the shock when they had those ads with ther PeeCees in the computer magazines. Up until that point SGI and SUN where kind of the good guys to me. Now, how could they have done it differently? I'd say: build up the lead in gaming consoles and developer workstations they had ad the time. IRIX/MIPS had also some technical advantages over Linux-Clusters in some niches like military simulations. They could have become some sort of NVidia in our days. Does any one has a more qualified strategy / commentary about SGI's demise in the markets to offer? Thanks.

donw 18y ago
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but were I SGI, back when PCs had just started getting to the point of running true 3D games, I would have had the company enter the graphics-card market. The SGI name could have easily carried a premium price-tag, and could have provided a compelling upgrade line for customers when PCs just didn't cut the mustard any longer. This would have also let SGI position themselves to sell Maya across-the-board, giving them yet another solid revenue stream, and could have also let them jump into the console market, becoming the graphics vendor that powered the PlayStation, Sega Genesis, and so on.
- bbgm 18y ago
  Well in a way that's what happened, but that company was Nvidia not SGI, since many of their folks left to join NVidia.
sgoraya 18y ago
SGI clearly had the cutting edge graphics technology and hardware - In my mind, the 3D video cards killed them very quickly and made SGI obsolete. As you may recall, when the 3Dfx Voodoo's were hitting the market, SGI did nothing at all, thinking that they still had the market cornered. Then came ATI, Creative, Nvidia etc. Back then there was the delineation between 'gaming' video cards and 'workstation' video cards, the latter having the premium price. SGI could have positioned themselves in both areas, especially the workstation cards. It was a classic case of a large, entrenched, slow moving company getting thwarted by startups. Too slow or unwilling to act / react...
- dangoldin 18y ago
  Part of it may have been that they didn't want to cannibalize their current business so didn't really know what to do. At that time the 3d cards were low end and not a direct threat. A great example of the "Innovator's Dilemma"
- samlittlewood 18y ago
  It seems a pretty good example of how important talent is vs. the shingle outside the door. 3dfx was founded by ex. SGI talent - Gary Tarolli, Ross Smith and Scott Sellers. (Garry Tarolli wrote dogfight)

iamelgringo 18y ago

There's probably young-uns here who don't know who Silicon Graphics is or what they did. Silicon Graphics sold proprietary unix systems that were very heavily optimized for doing graphics rendering. Their workstations sold from $10,000 on the low end to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were expensive, but if you wanted to do real time 3D stuff for animation, visual effects, CAD applications, or any type of graphics modelling, they were the only game in town, and you pretty much had to use their boxes. Their products were amazing in their time, and they pushed the state of the art in computer graphics hardware for years. But, between the ability to create relatively cheap linux based render farms with commodity hardware on the server side, and ATI/NVidia creating great plug in graphics cards for PC's/Workstations, SGI wasn't able to compete. They slowly died and faded away into obsolescence. Some of the last remnants of their technology that people interact with frequently is the OpenGL api. Silicon Graphics, you will be missed.

bbgm 18y ago
I spent most of grad school with one Octane on top of my desk (my primary machine) and a second one under my desk. Beautifully engineered, rock solid and great for their time. But SGI's steps post about 1998 were just crazy. Windows boxes with no software, a failure to realize how powerful linux systems were going to get, and losing their OpenGL team to NVidia. Will certainly be missed.
aston 18y ago
Further tying the past to the present, Google now inhabits the offices that SGI had to leave behind as their business declined. As far as I can tell, Google kept the old building numbers, too, which explains why the first building Google moved into were numbered in the forties.
sgoraya 18y ago
Great summary- I fondly recall my indigo2 workstation + 19 inch monitor, that weighed like a 100 lbs and was about 2ft. deep :) As time went on, our graveyard of SGI machines in the company attic grew and grew... OpenGL - wondrous technology back then and even now - Im getting nostalgic remembering the OpenGL vs. DirectX wars/discussions we had in the office.

patrickg-zill 18y ago

SGI killed themselves, just took a long time to die. They had geniuses working in their graphics side, and when they decided some 15 years ago that "Unix was dead" and WinNT was the future, those geniuses left for Nvidia and other places. SGI never recovered and ended up reselling supercomputers with ATI cards in them.

biohacker42 18y ago
For what it's worth, MS bought the companies that made a lot of the killer apps for SGI and ported them to Windows-only. It wasn't pure suicide, Microsoft helped.
- Andys 18y ago
  "It wasn't pure suicide, Microsoft helped." A common theme running through the history of the industry.
- slackerIII 18y ago
  Which companies/products were those?
  - Keyframe 18y ago
    Softimage for example - once they have done the port to WINNT and showed the world it can be done on that platform they have sold Softimage to AVID - which recently sold it to, where all good applications die, Autodesk (Microsoft in shadows)
Tamerlin 18y ago
SGI didn't switch to NT they switched to Linux. Their Columbia supercomputer isn't a Windows machine, it's a Linux machine.
- bbgm 18y ago
  Oh they tried NT. Even played with one of those machines. They even looked ugly. They do a lot of Linux now, and have been playing with hybrid architectures. Another bet of theirs that failed were their Altix systems since the Itanium went nowhere fast

ComputerGuru 18y ago

I assume the 25MM value is in the patents and research?

jwilliams 18y ago
Not really. It looks like they are carrying a considerably amount of debt (half a billion). They list their assets at some $100 million below that. I'd be surprised if a lot of the core patents/IP hasn't already been sold off.

known 18y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Template_Library http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Template_Library

access_denied 18y ago
Thanks for the link. Can you add some context for why you think this is relevant ot the topic?
- amitt 18y ago
  the C++ STL library was based off of the header based standard developed at SGI. So if you've used STL before in C++, you're building off the work that came out of SGI.
  - bd 18y ago
    Oh memories, I remember spending a lot of time here: http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl (SGI's STL documentation)

zandorg 18y ago

And Jim Clark 'marries' while ROM burns.

jballanc 18y ago

Damn, SGI is right there with Digital in the category of amazing companies that brought us amazing advances and didn't deserver the fate that befell them. ...looks like Sun might be the next member of that club...

iamwil 18y ago

I worked there as an intern back in 2000. I did chip circuit verification, and saw that they had roadmaps for their future products up to around 2006. The group I was in was designing server chips and their interconnects to make clusters of high performance super computers. I recall that they knew Intel was making dual and quadcore chips that would kill what they were doing, but had no solution how to turn the ship around. It's too bad. There were some solid engineers there, especially the ones that came from Cray.

joshu 18y ago

Anyone know WHY? What are they paying 600m for?