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They picked the wrong horse (680x0) at the wrong time (late 80s/early 90s) in a market that no longer exists, that niche between high end personal computers and
by reeses 13y ago
They picked the wrong horse (680x0) at the wrong time (late 80s/early 90s) in a market that no longer exists, that niche between high end personal computers and low end workstations.
This was about the time both MIPS and SPARC were finding their legs and Intel started to get its act together with the 486. In addition, this was the time the first wave of commodity graphics accelerators were on the market and NeXT couldn't scale up the way SGI could.
If they had managed to exploit the ND boards, it may have been a different story and SGI may have failed to secure the graphics workstation market, but they really didn't have much of a chance against Windows and SPARC on technology or HP and IBM on financials.
- mietek 13y ago> In addition, this was the time the first wave of commodity graphics accelerators were on the market NeXT was already out of the hardware business for three years when 3dfx introduced Voodoo in 1996, same year NeXT bought Apple for negative $400M.
- reeses 13y agoI was referring to the workstation market, where Sun and SGI were stitching up that market. GX, LX, and Élan were arriving on the market when NeXT only had ND. 3dfx was, for obvious economic reasons, not a slice of the solid, high, or extreme IMPACT graphics that were available on the desktop at the time of its release. It was more competitive with the options for Ultra, but Sun had already conceded the high end graphics market to SGI.