SGI Files Bankruptcy. The end of an era. It’s all about commodity and open source now.
Silicon Graphics Inc., the pioneering computer giant known for sophisticated 3-D visualization technology, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and will embark on a major reorganization in a bid to reduce its debt by $250 million.
Layoffs [of 1800 employees] were not part of the announcement … SGI made its name by making powerful computers used for sophisticated visualization systems [and] also helped create the special effects on such movies as “Jurassic Park,” “The Matrix” and “The Phantom Menace.”
[Analyst Crawford Del Prete of International Data Corp. said], “SGI delivered excellent products to performance-oriented customers that were willing to pay a premium … By focusing squarely on digital content creation and supercomputing they are going after small pools of very demanding customers. The problem is, there are some very capable competitors going after that same space.”
In related news, Iowa State University’s new VR Apps center, “the most realistic virtual reality room in the world,” is now brought to you by HP and Sony.
The new equipment — a Hewlett-Packard computer featuring 96 graphics processing units, 24 Sony digital projectors, an eight-channel audio system and ultrasonic motion tracking technology — will be installed by Fakespace Systems Inc.
Good luck trying to save money by choosing Fakespace, Iowa State. Let me know how that goes for you.
Roland Piquepaille‘s take on the room: “It’s ironic that [ISU] announced a big upgrade of its C6 virtual reality (VR) room the same day as SGI filed for bankruptcy. Back in 2000, this 10x10x10 feet room was powered by SGI Onyx2 computers.”
As Linuxhead Bob C. suggests, “maybe SGI’s Altix and NumaLink systems will help them fight back.”
Oh, for the days when an Infinite Reality 3-pipe Onyx 3200 was a thing of beauty to behold.
I think ISU is making a mistake, but hey, they’re Iowa.
Don’t forget that SGI was founded by Jim Clark, who went to Tulane, and later founded Netscape.
The 3 things I think of when thinking of SGI are GL, RISC, and the nVidia lawsuit. GL, their graphics language, is now OpenGL (I used an early clone called VOGL back before GL became open), and the opening of that was a very good strategy for SGI. The big problem technologically was that they had all their cookies in MIPS’ RISC basket, and as MIPS went the way of DEC’s Alpha, they lost all competitive advantage.
At this point, all they had was their intellectual property, and the failure to defend that (in the nVidia lawsuit and others) spelled their doom.
Good article at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/09/sgi_chapter11_analysis/
SGI was a great company once and I wish they had pursued their GL research, the Windows workstations and VizServer, which I think is still the best software to share 3D data at multiple locations in real time. For a large VR center, SGI should be considered for graphics, but not for many smaller instances of VR, such as little meeting rooms for viewing data or individual workstations.
That was a great article. Do you think it was a purposeful Belluzzo sabotage operation to get Microsoft in on the market?
I don’t think that Belluzzo intentionally sabotaged SGI at the time, but man, what idiot allowed him to escape to MS? Can you say “no-compete clause”? SGI can’t.
At this point, the best thing that could happen to them would be to get bought out by Apple. Just like Dell bought Alien for a top-end box, I think that Apple could get the SGI assets. With the unix back end of OS X, a port for IRIX could be easily done, and would give Apple even more cred in the ultra-high-end, ultra-high-margin graphics market.
Belluzzo, to me, kind of sounds like Robert Palmer, the former Digital CEO. He basically sold off all the good parts of the company, somehow managed to sell off the Alpha chipmaking to facilities to Intel as a result of a IP theft case that DEC WON(?), and the shell of the company was bought out by Compaq.
They both probably, at the time, did good for their shareholders, but they utterly sabotaged the company, the engineers, the employees, and their customers. I’m sure it got them both big bonuses.