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Sun and SGI lost out long before that. It's not like people just stopped buying Sun workstations a couple years ago; they were already out of style a decade ag

by wheels 18y ago

Sun and SGI lost out long before that. It's not like people just stopped buying Sun workstations a couple years ago; they were already out of style a decade ago. While I was in college, in the late 90s, I saw all of the workstations that were Sun's when I came in be replaced by PCs running Linux. This was before OS X 1.0 even was available, and it was a few more years even before Mac users started warming to OS X. Sun might have been doing some interesting things, but they've pretty much had a decade of investing into technologies they don't have a way to monetize, both in software and hardware. I'm just glad that it's IBM buying them since I think of the potential acquirers, that IBM would be the closest fit to keep some of their character intact.

gaius 18y ago
What killed SGI was high-end applications (mechanical engineering, 3D graphics, oil & gas exploration, computational chemistry) being ported to NT and the Windows games industry underwriting the development of graphics cards powerful enough to rival workstations at a fraction of the price. Neither Linux nor OSX were significant factors in the downfall of SGI.
- wheels 18y ago
  That's a good point, but I don't think it's the whole story, and is probably more true for SGI than Sun. I think part of my bias in how I see things was I really only caught the tail end of Sun's heyday in the early days of web serving when a lot was being served up by Sun machines running Netscape's web server. In universities there was also a shift from Solaris to Linux, but by the time I was away from working student jobs (did admin and web app devel for the college starting in '97) those spaces were Linux dominated.
stcredzero 18y ago
Sun might have been doing some interesting things, but they've pretty much had a decade of investing into technologies they don't have a way to monetize To monetize, you need a combination of strategic vision and marketing. "Strategic vision and marketing" is basically Apple! (Also IBM, but in it's more conventional, stodgy way.)
blogimus 18y ago
I had a similar experience at my school. In 1995-96 most of the existing Sun workstations in the computer labs were replaced with Gateway boxes running Windows NT.

by wheels 18y ago

gaius 18y ago

What killed SGI was high-end applications (mechanical engineering, 3D graphics, oil & gas exploration, computational chemistry) being ported to NT and the Windows games industry underwriting the development of graphics cards powerful enough to rival workstations at a fraction of the price. Neither Linux nor OSX were significant factors in the downfall of SGI.

wheels 18y ago
That's a good point, but I don't think it's the whole story, and is probably more true for SGI than Sun. I think part of my bias in how I see things was I really only caught the tail end of Sun's heyday in the early days of web serving when a lot was being served up by Sun machines running Netscape's web server. In universities there was also a shift from Solaris to Linux, but by the time I was away from working student jobs (did admin and web app devel for the college starting in '97) those spaces were Linux dominated.

stcredzero 18y ago

Sun might have been doing some interesting things, but they've pretty much had a decade of investing into technologies they don't have a way to monetize To monetize, you need a combination of strategic vision and marketing. "Strategic vision and marketing" is basically Apple! (Also IBM, but in it's more conventional, stodgy way.)

blogimus 18y ago

I had a similar experience at my school. In 1995-96 most of the existing Sun workstations in the computer labs were replaced with Gateway boxes running Windows NT.