SGI Lives On, In Name At Least 107
Hugh Pickens writes "In a surprise corporate move, after Rackable Systems received bankruptcy court approval on April 30 to close its purchase of SGI, the company announced on Monday that the deal had closed and that the combined company would be called SGI — short for Silicon Graphics International instead of the original Silicon Graphics Inc. The revival of the SGI brand will certainly please people in Silicon Valley with a historical bent, as SGI has been one of the area's true icons. However, some consider this a curious turn of events, considering that Rackable has come to represent the new guard in the server market, while SGI has struggled for years. Executives hope the name change will help it expand its business overseas, where SGI is a better-known brand. The new SGI will also continue to develop and support the high-performance computing systems that Silicon Graphics was known for, says Rackable's president and CEO. 'There should be no disruption to Silicon Graphics customers.'"
Recognition is not the same as approval (Score:5, Insightful)
Although the SGI "brand" is still widely recognized, I am not convinced it has a lot of value. After all, if SGI had a whole lot of happy customers (left) then it would not be in the situation of being sold to WhatsItsName.
I am not sure I would want to chance the name of my company to something that makes people say, "Oh, wow, you're still around?" (especially given that I work for one of those)
Re:Recognition is not the same as approval (Score:2, Insightful)
Fanbase is never about what is currently happening to their object of worship. Fans are about what was in the glory days when they became infatuated with that object.
I remember glory days of SGI when it was an amazing graphics workstation. I remember looking at stereopairs of new protein folds in InsightII.
They were top of the notch graphics workstations and as a fan I am quite excited that the brand is kept.
Re:State of IRIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean IRIX will be developed again? I'm not seeing any info one way or the other.
As a Linux and BSD guy, I'm pretty ignorant about IRIX other than the MIPS support. Does IRIX do anything innovative that makes developing it worthwhile?
No. And I'm fairly certain of that.
IRIX was discontinued in 2006 by SGI - http://www.sgi.com/support/mips_irix.html [sgi.com] - and most of the cool technical features of IRIX were ported over to Linux ages ago - like xfs http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/ [sgi.com]. Actually, the correct question is will this new, improved and revived SGI continue to support the open source efforts of the old SGI regime? http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ [sgi.com] . I don't see a point in reviving IRIX, but there was a lot of OSS work done out of that shop and I'd hate to see it disappear. Right?
Re:Didn't Caldera do something similar with SCO? (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably the "giving back" is a reference to XFS [wikipedia.org]. They may have given more, but nothing else that I'm aware of has been high-profile.
Re:Faux pais? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean SGI is or was an icon in high-end graphics and workstations, not a web-hosting company.
Rackable isn't a web hosting company, you are likely confusing them with RackSpace.