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Ditching BBOS and using Android is exactly what SGI tried to do by ditching IRIX and going with Windows NT. It destroyed the company. Not that BBM has any hop

by kjackson2012 13y ago

Ditching BBOS and using Android is exactly what SGI tried to do by ditching IRIX and going with Windows NT. It destroyed the company. Not that BBM has any hope at this point, but getting rid of BBOS is not the solution, because they will lose their current fans, and they will not migrate over any existing Android users.

rwg 13y ago
The Visual Workstation line failed because you could get 90% of the performance for <50% of the cost by buying/building a dual-PII/PIII workstation and throwing an NVIDIA graphics card in it. The architecture SGI used for the initial pair of Visual Workstations was proprietary and didn't provide enough performance gain to justify its proprietary-ness, and the later models were just bog-standard PCs with bog-standard NVIDIA graphics cards slapped in pretty SGI cases with huge price tags. The Visual Workstation line would've failed no matter what operating system they ran. But the Visual Workstation line's failure was merely one gut punch in a succession of gut punches that destroyed SGI. SGI had two core competencies: graphics workstations and HPC. The availability of cheap (comparatively) multi-processor x86 workstations running ports of formerly IRIX-only software killed their workstation lines, and the combination of Itanium being late, Itanium trailing way behind x86 in $/FLOPS and watts/FLOP, and x86 clusters with fast Myrinet (later 10GigE and Infiniband) interconnects becoming in vogue killed most (not all, but enough) of SGI's HPC market share. (I type this all with a bit of sadness: part of my first job out of college was running and porting software to a 20 CPU, 20 GB RAM SGI Power Challenge 10000, and I still have a soft spot for exotic big iron.)
biomecha 13y ago
Totally agree with you. The last thing BB should do is get rid of their assets. Besides, UI-wise, BBOS is already quite close to android, and very open to android apps: develop your app for android, convert it trivially to a BB app with the SDK tools and you're done. My main gripe as a dev. regarding BB is the same as for Bada (Tizen ancestor): no SDK on linux (which also means BSD). It's a minor point though. Nah, the real problem with BB is its image outside its user base. I bet most people associate BB with tiny devices with tiny keyboard, while people think of Apple and Android stuff as cool, fashionable. Their latest product sports touch screens and perhaps more, but it will take time for the public to pick it up.

rwg 13y ago

The Visual Workstation line failed because you could get 90% of the performance for <50% of the cost by buying/building a dual-PII/PIII workstation and throwing an NVIDIA graphics card in it. The architecture SGI used for the initial pair of Visual Workstations was proprietary and didn't provide enough performance gain to justify its proprietary-ness, and the later models were just bog-standard PCs with bog-standard NVIDIA graphics cards slapped in pretty SGI cases with huge price tags. The Visual Workstation line would've failed no matter what operating system they ran. But the Visual Workstation line's failure was merely one gut punch in a succession of gut punches that destroyed SGI. SGI had two core competencies: graphics workstations and HPC. The availability of cheap (comparatively) multi-processor x86 workstations running ports of formerly IRIX-only software killed their workstation lines, and the combination of Itanium being late, Itanium trailing way behind x86 in $/FLOPS and watts/FLOP, and x86 clusters with fast Myrinet (later 10GigE and Infiniband) interconnects becoming in vogue killed most (not all, but enough) of SGI's HPC market share. (I type this all with a bit of sadness: part of my first job out of college was running and porting software to a 20 CPU, 20 GB RAM SGI Power Challenge 10000, and I still have a soft spot for exotic big iron.)

biomecha 13y ago

Totally agree with you. The last thing BB should do is get rid of their assets. Besides, UI-wise, BBOS is already quite close to android, and very open to android apps: develop your app for android, convert it trivially to a BB app with the SDK tools and you're done. My main gripe as a dev. regarding BB is the same as for Bada (Tizen ancestor): no SDK on linux (which also means BSD). It's a minor point though. Nah, the real problem with BB is its image outside its user base. I bet most people associate BB with tiny devices with tiny keyboard, while people think of Apple and Android stuff as cool, fashionable. Their latest product sports touch screens and perhaps more, but it will take time for the public to pick it up.