SGI Warns That Bankruptcy Might Be Year-End Option 307
tbcpp writes "OS News reports: "SGI issued its most ominous regulatory filing to date, warning that a bad 2006 could force the former high-flyer into bankruptcy. In order to improve its business, SGI will consider measures ranging from axing or selling off product lines to pursuing 'a strategic partner or acquirer.' The hardware maker will basically look at anything and everything to remain a going concern.""
The Circle Closes (Score:5, Interesting)
When I got up to present it, I had made a video that captured the output through a capture device of the SGI box. It was a real pain in the ass to capture that in high quality but I did. One of the females in the audience (and it was a large audience) raised her hand and asked me why it looked like shit. I told her that it was because SGI servers concentrate on points of location--not really graphics. She balked at my explanation and kind of scoffed at me for not finding another alternative that sold better. She told me her son's PS2 rendered better graphics than that. I agreed though I said her son's PS2 wasn't concerned about exact locations and LADAR images.
What I'm trying to say is that they've been surpassed in quality.
Oh, and another thing, I had to get these LADAR images across the network onto a Windows machine that was running a webservice. Let me tell you that the support for NTFS and SAMBA servers on SGI servers is really not there anymore. I barely got something to work and that was pretty ganky.
My coworker (who is ten years older than I) told me that those purple boxes used to sell for ~$125k. Now, he says you can pick up the newer ones for around $25k. That's quite the drop in market dominance.
Goodbye SGI, I'm sorry things didn't work out better for you. You lost site of what kept you floating. In the long long ago, I hear tell you made the product. Today, that foothold has crumbled.
Re:The Circle Closes (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually I'd wager the price drop was to stay in competition with the growing dominance of cheap commodity hardware. Of course it didn't work, but that's besides the point.
Place I'm at used to be a big SGI place.. O2000, 192 cpus, 48 GB memory, was a multi-million monster when it was new. It ran a batch server for user jobs. Then in 2001 they started
Re:The Circle Closes (Score:2)
It would also take quite the Indigo2 configuration to hit 100k.
Re:The Circle Closes (Score:5, Interesting)
SGI could easily sell an amazing, high-end but commodity artist's station for 5k. SGI is a legendary brand, and could easily compete with Alienware for the multi-thousand dollar multi-graphics card gaming market. Or external "renderfarms in a box." Or one of a million other things that they could do with some technical wizardry on commodity hardware.
Specialty hardware and OS's are going away. It is just too much RnD money to sink into chipsets that will only go into a few thousand machines, let alone the software layers required to make working with that power easy.
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Re:The Circle Closes (Score:3, Insightful)
And, contrary to the Slashdot headline, SGI is one of the companies that is kicking in some of that $10 billion.
Re:What do SGI, Atheros, and Rambus share in commo (Score:2)
Okay, genius, how about Decru or VMWare? Those acquisitions averaged half a billion dollars each; Decru was last year AFAIK and VMWare was about four years ago. Also, Mike Farmwald was a Purdue professor, not a Stanford professor.
You're just jealous, must be a Cal
Please Elaborate (Score:3, Funny)
Congratulations.
I relayed a story of my experiences with SGI. Care to tell the readers what it is, precisely, that I'm mistaken on? I know I had to work with an
ouch (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ouch (Score:3, Informative)
them's the breaks (Score:5, Insightful)
SGI's heyday was when most people thought of them as The Purple Computer Company; the Jurassic Park Era. And yes, their lack of a brand identity and strategy was part of their undoing.
Re:them's the breaks (Score:2)
SGI's heyday was when most people thought of them as The Purple Computer Company; the Jurassic Park Era. And yes, their lack of a brand identity and strategy was part of their undoing.
I don't think they had a lack of brand identity, I think thats all they had. I've only minimal exposure to SGI workstations, but I view them much like Sun or HPUX machines. Very expensive and very proprietary (and at one time very high performance). Perhaps a distorted view now - I haven't followed their Linux offerings.
In
Re:them's the breaks (Score:3, Interesting)
Except sun is still innovative.
dtrace, ZFS and zones on the software end (Solaris runs on sparc, x86 and amd64), UltraSPARC T1 on the hardware end (coolthreads, look it up). That said, they even offer linux machines if that's what floats your (phb's) boat.
I don't work for Sun or anything either, btw.
Their demise was cemented before Itanium (Score:2)
Too little, too late. Pity, much of their gear is excellent. I suppose it's too late now for AMD64s on a stick or some other Plan B which slashes manufacturing costs without destroying quality.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:them's the breaks (Score:2)
The advert they had in various magazines and on their website in the early 1990's was perhaps too successful. This was the picture with several levels of scaffolding around a large Tyrannosaurus Rex, silhouettes of people standing around on the floor and the caption at the bottom: "SGI - helping build a better dinosaur". This was available in both low-resolution and high-resolution image formats (there's
Linux killed SGI, not Itanium (Score:3, Informative)
Linux killed SGI, not Itanium. I've always argued that Linux is a far greater threat to traditional unix vendors. like Sun and SGI, than to Microsoft. Sun and SGI sold many systems to users who did not really need anything Sun or SGI specific. For some they just needed a generic unix box and a PC running Linux was a whole hell of a lot cheaper than a Sun. With PC graphics cards getting decent 3D hardware, some found a PC running Lin
No, RICK BELLUZZO KILLED SGI (Score:5, Insightful)
He then went to sabotage SGI with the SAME STUPID GAMBIT, before finally going "home" to Microsoft.
Re:No, RICK BELLUZZO KILLED SGI (Score:5, Informative)
SGI's greatest asset was its amazing engineers. Many strategies would have been possible for a management team that understood the power of the people SGI has in their engineering organization. Belluzzo was a commodity, cookie cutter guy. He couldn't create his way out of a paper bag. Good riddance.
Steve, a former SGI system software developer
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Re:them's the breaks (Score:3, Insightful)
"We're going to compete in mid-range business servers". Squashed by IBM from above and Sun from below, especially as bankers think of them as "the Jurassic-Park people".
"We're going to makes Windows NT boxes". Twice as long development as their competitors. Nice machines, steep price, wierd drivers, and ineffectual marketing (as well as insufficient effort porting key apps that Irix graphics customers were used to).
"We're going t
So, so sexy (Score:5, Funny)
I used to dream about these boxes. Of course whenever that wonderful experience came over me, the wife would wake me up for real sex.
Gawd.
Re:So, so sexy (Score:2)
I've often window-shopped for SGI machines on Ebay. I just think its cool being able to purchase computers that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars for a couple hundred bucks. I've always balked though, because the big SGI machines use tons of electricity, have pretty skechy Linux support, and their keyboards, monitors, and peripherals are somewhat proprietary and thus rather pricey.
So I have my poor-man's SGI: and Athlon-XP with
Re:So, so sexy (Score:2, Informative)
You wouldn't run Linux on them, I hope. When you're running a classic UNIX box with high end graphics, you don't want whatever graphics support 'the hackers' have come up with, particularly when you're running a formerly rare expensive framebuffer. The same is true when running Sun's classic 'High End' framebuffers. The cg14 just isn't hacker friendly without the full docs that Sun won't provide.
Re:So, so sexy (Score:3, Insightful)
That's cause you haven't actually done it.
I have a few bigass suns in my barn I picked up, 4 yrs old for like 2 cents on the dollar. Lots of cpus, ram and disk.
Like I said, they're sitting in the barn now. My not so recent IBM 1U servers are way faster and use a tiny fraction of the power.
The Suns would be ok space heaters if they wern't so damn noisy.
Altix, missteps (Score:5, Insightful)
I also feel they lost a lot of momentum by dabbling in various unpopular markets like high end NT workstations, expensive specialty graphics workstations (given this was a core market for them earlier, but high power graphics became commoditized) and didn't really strongly launch into the linux server market and make a big presence in time. If they had pushed a cheaper starting system for a scalable single system box they may have done better, but who knows.
Re:Altix, missteps (Score:2)
It is unfortunate, but I am pretty sure that SGI committed to and started designing IA64 systems before Opteron was announced. I think SGI started its transition to IA64 shortly after it was announced.
Re:Altix, missteps (Score:2)
Death (Score:2)
End of story
Re:Death (Score:2)
Re:Death (Score:5, Insightful)
The Fat Lady (Score:2)
That is because the Fat Lady took a job at NVidia.
Baby that's a fact... (Score:2)
Everything dies, baby that's a fact.
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
-- Springsteen, "Atlantic City"
I call the logo! (Score:4, Funny)
The SEC should require Sun to buy them... (Score:2)
Don't hate me; I just think that Sun has made some *questionable* decisions since I bought their stock :-(
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Please let it be IBM (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't forget the STL. (Score:4, Informative)
SGI gave us whizbang graphics, spiffy NUMA stuff, and XFS (and more, let the list begin here). Some of the people there are obviously clever.
Don't forget the Standard Template Library [sgi.com].
Might wanna download all the docs before the bankruptcy court pulls the plug on the servers.
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Re:Please let it be IBM (Score:2)
Re:Please let it be IBM --- nope, it was Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
They already sold their entire patent portfolio to Microsoft several years ago (1998?) for ~$60M in an attempt to stay alive. Very sad.
Re:Please let it be IBM (Score:3, Informative)
There's a LOT of SGI people around the linux kernel (and not just for XFS) for example. Things like the numa-aware slab allocator, cpusets, or the swap migration [lwn.net] (new in 2.6.16) or other tons of scalability improvements that I can't remember habe been done by SGI people. If SGI loses, Linux loses a bit of horsepower.
Re:Please let it be IBM (Score:2)
just when I was congratulating myself on designing a cpu that I'll build out of discrete transistors. I manage to get a reference to the lowest piece of intelligence on the web
Really smart people, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have heard it said of Microsoft that they have so many really smart people, and you don't see it in the products that they actually release to us normal humans. (I have even heard people who work there say it: they say they have really cool stuff in house, that somehow never gets out, or when it gets out, the cool has been removed.)
I'd be interested in hearing other examples of "really smart engineers working there but the results that outsiders see are mediocre". Amazon.com is another example that comes to mind (I used to work there).
I do not have an explanation for why this happens so often.
A counterexample: I worked at Apple in the early 90s and, given the amount of really dim or useless people we had there, we had really GREAT products.
Re:Really smart people, but... (Score:2)
The same thing was also said about IBM Research.
Re:Really smart people, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the late 1980s I saw the same thing happen with a Hyundai. Motoring magazines reported on a really nice sporty little car they'd prototyped. It was really cute two door, a unique looking convertible that would have sold like hotcakes. Then as it got closer & closer to release it gained full rear seats instead of being a 2+2 layout. Then it got a bigger trunk for more luggage, a fatter roofline for more rear-seat passenger room. The "radical" front styling was softened, then it was given another two doors. In the end it was just another small four door hyundai, and when released was received so poorly it never made it out of Asia.
A press statement from Hyundai stated something along the lines of "market anticipation failed to convert to sales" when it was canned. That's because the beancounters, the conservative marketers massages the product into something virtually the antithesis of the original product the market built up its anticipation about.
Seems a common theme in the big companies, where something good is created but because of a lack of forceful "no. don't touch" from smart management everyone gets to poke their fingers in and change things, making Yet Another Lowest Common Denominator Product.
Where are my mod points? (Score:2)
That was one of the most interesting posts evar (or at least today).
(And to think I let my last two mod points go to something I don't even remember. Maybe they lapsed. See, I don't remember.)
Re:Really smart people, but... (Score:2)
Re:Really smart people, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Really smart people, but... (Score:2)
Google.
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Maybe Apple is buying.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe Apple is buying.. (Score:2)
At least they have alt more in common; Unix, graphics, video, cool looking boxes....
Re:Maybe Apple is buying.. (Score:3, Informative)
SGI's mid-90s Innovator's Dilemma... (Score:4, Insightful)
- trouble with quality and shipping on time (see IMPACT)
- couldn't match/switch from 3-4-year development cycles of the workstation business to 6-month product cycles of the PC graphics card business
- engineers were loath to give up control of the chipset/box/OS in order to settle for just controlling the graphics subsystem. They tried to be a full-system player in a PC world. Given that Compaq couldn't really do it (something that was at least semi-obvious at the time), its not a surprise they, coming from the workstation space, couldn't do it with their integrated NT workstations.
- The engineers were delivering product that was differentiated but not in the areas that the biggest customers cared the most about. The benefits of UMA (unified memory architecture) graphics just weren't in sync with what the market most wanted: the fastest 3D at the cheapest price. And in the classic workstation space, polygon-pushing was what was most needed. Half their business was CAD workstations and in the end they lost that to Sun/HP/IBM who didn't have the sexy texture mapping stuff but could render polygons "good enough".
SGI also benefitted from many years from the other workstation vendors under-investing in 3D graphics. When that era ended, even the workstation business they were in got a heck of a lot more competitive.
Anyway, that's what comes to mind when I remember back to SGI in the mid-90s. In hindsight, I don't know of any silver bullets that would have gotten them out of the situation; it was death by a thousand cuts. At the time, I wondered if a merger with Apple would have made sense but it wasn't clear that the disfunctionality of the two organizations at the time would have melded into something better. (11072394) Maybe a damn good CEO could have helped them carve out a more defensible role in the industry; that's the only thing that got Apple through as far as I'm concerned.
Opengl ? (Score:4, Informative)
How will this affect Opengl or is it completely independent of SGI now?
I recently took an opengl class at SGI in Mountain View. The class and material was good but the desktop SGI machines were less than impressive. The final application I ended up with ran at 20 fps on the SGI machine and at 250 fps on my vanilla dell 2.5ghz pentium with intel integrated graphics. I mean come on, they are supposed to be the graphics dudes. I forget which SGI model it was but is was a weirdly shaped purple mini-tower (couldn't stack anything on top of it, thats for sure). If they hoped to ever sell anything to the classroom attendees then they shouldn't have given us something that made them look so bad.
Re:Opengl ? (Score:2)
Re:Opengl ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Current OpenGL license (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.sgi.com/products/software/opengl/licen
Re:Opengl ? (Score:3, Funny)
Came out in 1991, used to make Terminator 2. It's no wonder it was crap.
2nd read:
Came out in 1991, used to make Terminator 2. It's no wonder it was crap.
Well, I'd say they managed to get pretty good results with that box. But I also understand that the rendering market has moved forward quite a bit in 15 years...
When there's blood in the streets... (Score:3, Interesting)
"When there's blood in the streets, buy!"
So i finally got around to buying it at $12/share. That was its peak. I waited and waited, but only lost and lost. I sold most of it at something like $5/share.
Two lessons learned:
1) Some companies have more blood than you think they do.
2) I am not (nor was ever) a real stock trader.
To hear that SGI's only now announcing the possibility of bankruptcy tells me they had years worth of blood left...
(My friend never sold his stock and AFAIK still holds his shares!)
Re:When there's blood in the streets... (Score:3, Insightful)
By investing in only one company, you really put yourself at a disadvantage.
Re:When there's blood in the streets... (Score:2)
Sadly, you have not, but should also have learned:
3) The difference between a bull and a bear
I have to agree with BlackTriangle. It's obvious you don't know anything about stocks, and I hope you're at least smart enough to get out right away, before you lose everything.
People act like the stock market is a money-making machine. But truthfully, it's a lot closer to a horse race or py
Re:Bad moderation strikes again... (Score:2)
No, actually you're the know-nothing moron here, to be honest.
Click on the CID link of any post, and below the comment will be the moderation history. Clicking on yours, I see nothing. Clicking on his, I also see nothing. That means nobody modded his comment up or down, he just posts at -1 due to lots of previous bad behavior. Most trolls, flamers, et al. post at -1.
OTOH, if you click on the CID link for this
State of the Art: SGI is so 1996 (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a strong pity for people that thought SGI was a Silicon Valley progenitor and captain, only to find that it was really a dopey engineering company determined to constantly reinvent the wheel, never use anything anyone else did, and had the quintessential not-invented-here sickness that nearly killed Silicon Valley after co-inventing it.
It's my fervent hope that they just liquidate, and get it over with. My advice: skip Chapter 11 and go straight for seven, and put SGI and its employees (I've known many) out of its constant misery and pain.
nostalgia (Score:5, Interesting)
If there's ever a funeral for SGI, I'd show up.
Idiots should have got into the GFX card market. (Score:3, Insightful)
They were responsible for the OpenGL spec itself, had a ton of influence on directions taken in the CG market generally, and instead sang endlessly about something called "Virtual Reality" while the rest of the world realised that unless it could be affordably domesticated, there would be no market for it. While NVIDIA and ATI said "Hey, mind if I check out this 'gaming' thing while you're out?" they were selling Caves with Dolby and a few O2's to CEOs of mining companies and a few UNI's once or twice a year.
I know, I worked in one. SGI reps would come over with "THE FUTURE" written all over their face even when we were openly replacing their boxes with white PC's running GeForce cards.
Snobbery or stupidity (they often converge), it is utterly their fault.
Re:Idiots should have got into the GFX card market (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh... people who worked for SGI DID. It ain't their fault that management's a bunch of asshats.
Where the smegging hell do you think ATI and NVidia got their talent, hmmmmmmm?
Well, those buzzards are tired (Score:3, Informative)
I have a friend there, he says the've lost money for 28 straight quarters. The layoffs they do EVERY quarter don't exactly help morale, either.
They're a premium brand, and USED to have cool stuff. They got passed in the graphics business, their bet on Itanium turned out to be a turkey, and the government isn't buying SGI stuff like they used to -- they used to have some nice hookups there.
Turn out the lights, the party's over.
But what about ... (Score:2)
OpenGL (Score:2)
Anyone interested in forming an OpenGL foundation?
Re:OpenGL (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OpenGL (Score:3, Insightful)
And what of subsequent revisions of the spec? Are they always guaranteed to be open?
I Swear To God... (Score:2, Funny)
Changes (Score:2, Insightful)
SGI stands for (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory semantic reminder (Score:2)
SGI will certainly be around for a while, though probably with fewer employees and products. Of course, they're already way past being an important player in the marketplace.
I know why it goes bankrupcy (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple *was* cool and *is* cool. I, like many many many of you, own an iPod.
How SGI Can Save Itself (Score:3, Funny)
Using that same lowercase "i", SGI needs to create the following products:
iRIX -- a new "internet" version of their operating system. Based on Unix and with a slick looking GUI, it should be named after various breeds of Dogs.
iNDIGO -- A candy-colored all-in-one box, preferably purple, that glows while it's on, pulsates while downloading data from the network and runs absolutely silently.
iNDY -- A smaller version of the sam box. Maybe plays MP3s.
This series of moves should save them from death...
TTYL
Brian C.
Here's the problem. (Score:2)
Yeah - GRAPHICS.
They made a pretty OK server thingy - with a UNIX kinda thing - and they were black and purple with sexy blue lights...but in the end, the only thing that was truly, utterly, unique was blindingly fast realtime 3D graphics.
The very day the 3Dfx Voodoo and the TNT and their ilk appeared, you could get fast-ish 3D for $300 instead of $500,000. You just can't sustain a market in that environment. SGI's hardware was quite a bit better than the PC cards of the day - but
SGI is patent wealthy (Score:3, Interesting)
the best thing about sgi was the Bad Attitude(tm) (Score:2)
I guess they won't be around for the Jupiter 2 (Score:4, Funny)
I guess that's like the PAN-AM logo on the Shuttle in Kubrick's 2001.
Or the ATARI logo in Blade Runner.
Hrmm. The one thing you should not put in a Sci-Fi film is an existing corporate logo... Seems to be the kiss of death.
Re:You mean.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Killed by Belluzzo and Itanium. (Score:5, Interesting)
You kinda feel sorry for them - but this has been a long long time coming. Funny thing is that people call Itanium a failure; while in really it's key in helping Intel take 64-bit leadership away from MIPS & Alpha -- and Belluzzo got a president job at microsoft rummored to be largely because of his role in killing the microsoft competitors of SGI as its CEO and crippling the non-wintel parts of HP in his exc management role there.
Re:Killed by Belluzzo and Itanium. (Score:4, Informative)
SGI's problem is they only want to sell really high end systems. They want the high margin, low volume products. The problem is as PCs eat their marketshare, they compensate by focusing on even higher end products. I've talked with their salesmen about the issue, and they're actually rather proud of their business model. They absolutely refuse to consider lower margin, higher volume products. Looks like they're determined to stick with the business model until it the end.
Re:Killed by Belluzzo and Itanium. (Score:3, Insightful)
You make money by selling real computers. You do sell less of them, but you do make a profit and you get to sell a bunch of services.
SGI was making workstations and servers. The market for workstations died. Instead of focusing on high end machines and dropping the workstation market, they redesigned their workstations as funky coloured PCs. Now they
Re:You mean.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You mean.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You mean.... (Score:2)
C//
This can be remedied ... (Score:2)
This can all be remedied with $10 worth of spray paint and a decal.
SGI has been living in a bygone era. They literally are the modern mainframe.
Once upon a time, SGI sat in the drivers seat for providing services and software to an eager market. Instead, they relied on selling outrageously over-priced proprietary hardware while their competitors chiselled away at their market by selling toys that eventually were more sophisticated than anything SGI could offer.
And what about the software? 3rd parties hav
Re:Id go mainstream intel chip like apple! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Id go mainstream intel chip like apple! (Score:3, Informative)
O2's weren't teal.
O2's weren't $20,000.
You're spot on on everything else.
Re:Here comes Microsoft to save the day (Score:2)
Re:man ... (Score:2)