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Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics rebrands itself as 'SGI' 166

Posted by CmdrTaco from the boring-name-change dept.
Sent us a quote from SGI SGI's web page. It says "SGI now stands for Servers, Supercomputers, and Graphic Workstations that enable breakthrough Insights." You can read the press release. Now I gotta change the logo. The old one is just so much cooler.
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Silicon Graphics rebrands itself as 'SGI' More

Silicon Graphics rebrands itself as 'SGI'

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  • Say Goodbye, Irix
  • and while he's at it, he should fix his Apple logo. For some odd reason, rather than using the over-20-year-old striped Apple logo, which is still the official logo, he's using that ugly translucent blue thing from the G3 cases. It's not even the "new" corporate logo, just the logo on the G3 cases, so it should be linked to "G3," not to "Apple." the "Apple" link should still use the striped logo, which looks cooler anyway.
  • Last I'd heard, they were using a Challenge S with 160 MB/RAM and a 16 GB RAID--for everything but the RAM and the RAID, their lowest, entry-level server.

    If that's still the case, I'm hardly surprised.
  • I'd like to say something to all the posters here who have been on about SGI's new logo.

    Unless you're a total neophyte hobbyist, you don't buy computer systems like SGIs for the badging they've got--you buy it because of what's inside. Things like the CPU, the graphics, the software you're using or planning to use. Things of that sort will help you get things accomplished (i.e. help solve those problems you need a computer for in the first place)--the logo on the outside (and the color of the plastic casing) don't really help all that much.

    Do have your moment of silence. It's a good logo, after all, but at least be reasonable about it.

    But then, I care. Really.

    PS: For those who believe that the logo change will spiral the company into some sort of early grave, you've been wrong about that since 1995, and given your current track record on this issue, you're still likely to be wrong. If something as subtle and as largely irrelevant as a change of logo is enough to send you carping off about how a $5 billion/year company is somehow magically going to tank tommorrow, I'm sorry, but I think you've had it in for the company just because it's SGI.

    The logos aren't *that* important. The technology is, or it's supposed to be. But if I *did* have it my way, I'd redo the whole thing in Cyrillic (http://www.stonebug.net/sgi_new.jpg), so screw you.

    God, I'm canktankerous today.
  • The new logo just doesn't do it for me. The old cube always stood out and said - SGI, cool hardware. I always wanted one, but now... Anyway, sent them feedback re. the change. Won't do any good, but maybe if they get a ton of email/feedback from /.-ers, they might pause and ponder their corporate foolishness. How about a pool for the coolest workstation? Past and current models included?
  • Is it just me or does that "I" in the new logo looks kinda like the "I" that Iomega uses for the Jaz/Zip drives?

    The "Q," I mean "G," looks horrible, period.

  • They've always been there...

  • Done! (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    Seriously.

    Send them feedback and let them know that you think this stinks. Don't be a dick about it. Just say what you feel. That this doesn't appeal to you, that it doesn't represent the SGI you know and love. If you're a customer, TELL them that. But again, don't be a dick about it - that won't accomplish ANYTHING.

    I sent mine in as a customer and SGI-head. It's the least I could do.

  • Lame! (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    That's the butt-ugliest logo I've ever seen. They were fine with the ol' cube - it was their identity. As for what it stands for, LOL... "Silicon Graphics Incorporated" was just fine.

    Still make damned good machines though, even with the silly logo.

  • Lame! (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    Agreed - my buds and I always did the same too. We never called it "Silicon Graphics, Incorporated" or even "Silicon Graphics." It was always SGI. We knew what the logo meant, what the company stood for, and the ass-kicking boxes they made.
  • I guess this makes Lost In Space a dated movie, then, much in the same way that Atari makes Blade Runner look dated. :)

    I agree too... After the Sun logo, the SGI logo was one of the best. Ah well...

  • I would like to know the name of the friggin consultant/media shop that came up with this retarded thing. I guess somebody is laughing his ass of on the way to the bank! SGI, you have been seriously screwed!
    I guess it isn't long until sgi gets bought by Dell or some other lame clone maker like Digital.

    :(

    J.
  • Remember that Dilbert skecth?

    :)
  • Actually, I agree with this assessment. Rick Belluzo looks to be a good CEO, but I think he didn't like the SGI "mystique". He's a back-to-basics guy and his job is to move SGI away from the elite and into the mainstream where it can actually make money.

    Do I like this? Not at all. Why buy from SGI, when we have HP, Sun or IBM?

    Note that I don't particularily see this attitude in the website - just in the overall remake of the company.
  • Hmm.. I don't remember getting a shockwave request on the front page when I surfed there under Linux... I'll have to check again.

    Also note that Shockwave is considered a dream to most web artists.. I think it's very useful, though I just wish they'd hurry with a Linux port (I think there was a beta version of Flash, donno if they released it generally yet)
  • From SGI's point of view... its traditional audience isn't making it money... so it wants a new one.

    Is this a good thing? No, but it's probably their only real option, besides bankruptcy.

  • Sigh
    More proof that Marketing has no clues...but if it helps sgi sell more cool stuff and stops NT (un)workstations doing all the CAD it can't be a bad thing...

    Martin
  • Someone earlier brought up Borland. Well, the reason Borland changed thier name to Inprise was because they had a ton of product that they wanted to write off, and having to throw it away because of improper packaging was as good a way as any, and while I don't see how one can equate a 400$ software package to costly computers, I don't know, this could be one reason why they did it.


    For the record, this is the -dumbest- renaming I've ever seen. Well, it should make hiring from Silicon Graphics ^h^H^H^H^H^HH^ sgi easier though.


    It sort of reminds me of the kind of bullshit that tandem went through before being sold to Compaq. Tandem changed the logo from one color to another and called it revolutionary.


    Chris DiBona

    Evangelist, VA
    Chris DiBona
    --
    Grant Chair, Linux Int.
    VP, SVLUG

  • I just drove by thier flagship site on shoreline, I was screaming out "Lame..LAME...LAME", it's right there, this is -so- lame. I'm so glad my Indy has the old logo as the new one is -LAME-.

    Chris DiBona
    Evangelist, VA.
    --
    Grant Chair, Linux Int.
    VP, SVLUG

  • Then maybe we can have it, eh?

    --

  • I'm gonna jump on the bandwagon and cast my vote to keep the old logo around too. The new one is just doesn't hit me like the old one did when I first saw it...
  • Actually, no. The reason KFC stopped using "Kentucky Fried Chicken" has nothing to do with "Fried". You think that just 'cos they stop using the word "Fried" people will go, oh hey geez, look Martha, they're not "Fried" anymore?

    Wrongo-bedongo. The reason KFC went to the abbreviation is something else. It seems the State of Kentucky, deep in their asses in debt, decided to charge any corporations who used the word "Kentucky" in their names (like KFC, like the Kentucky Derby) a licensing fee. Rather than comply, KFC dropped the "Kentucky" moniker, as did the Kentucky Derby.

    Reference somewhere on http://www.snopes.com . Site's down now so I can't check it, but check it out when you got the time.

    An educational message from your pal,

    adr
  • That is by far the stupidest, shoehorned corporate name I've ever heard.

    It's like people making up names just to fit cutesy acronyms.

    SGI. Silicon Graphics Incorporated. Now that's a name, dammit.

    Way to go, guys.

    -- adr
  • I'm the biggest SGI fan there is. I *worship* that company. Or used to.

    Now, I hope they suffer a quick yet horrible demise, so we can at least remember them for what they were, and not for what they will become.

    I hate the new logo, I hate the new name, and above all, I hate the defeatist, conformist, bland, be-suited, tie-wearing, buzzword-spewing, Dilbertoid, stupid, corporate rationale behind it.

    SGI is dead, as far as I'm concerned. That doesn't make me love my Indy any less.
  • looks a lot like a toilet seat.

    I think the old logo is better.
  • Not true, there's lots of cool logos out there still. Witness: This logo [pythian.com], of my employer The Pythian Group, really neat-o logo once you figure it out. Any guesses as to what that geometry means?

    Any other links to good logos? We should have a contest.
    --

  • Give away (Score:1)

    by Tsk ( 2863 )
    Does this mean the'll give away all their 'old' machines where you can read Silicon Graphics ? I want one then ;-)


    Makes me wonder why is everybody changing names (ie Cygnus, SGI etc ....) ? It wont' help sell more. What will help SGI to sell more is a big price cut .... (and I mean a real big one). They also shouldn't go the Intel way and stick to their MIPS processors - everyone even Intel is going towards the Risc Way and SGI goes the other way around ? they should sell some techno to Intel and join the UA64 guys too ..
  • Silicon Gear, Inc. is a stupid acronym.

    Log

  • What a sad and weak logo!

    Comparing the two, I thought, "This logo [the cube] says we make cool, strong, powerful stuff. This new logo looks like someone sat on them."

    Sad.
  • How much do you reckon they paid some fancy-schmancy consultancy to come out with that inspired move?

    I would have done it for five bucks and a bag of chips.

    --
  • They now look like Yahoo! for christsakes!

    Naah, Yahoo's better. More functional and fewer graphics.

    The new SGI is here, and it looks hideous....
  • That's probably the DUMBEST reason I have ever heard NOT to buy a particular computer. I feel sorry for those who buy their computer because of the logo on the outside....

  • I live near Round Rock, Texas (Where PowerComputing was located), and managed to purchase a PowerTrip 233 from one of their engineers just after Apple ate PowerComputing.

    It's a PC laptop. Other than the minor bugs (which would have been worked out over an average product cycle), it's the best notebook I've ever used (Even runs GNU/Linux in 1024x768x24bit very well). They made good machines. It was a shame to see them fall... I got this notebook for about $1.7K (233 MHz P-MMX, 128MB RAM, Video Option, 13.4" Active-Matrix, everything), which wasn't too much less than for what PowerComputing was going to sell it to the public. Damned shame, that they never got a chance.


    The following sentence is true.
    The previous sentence is false.

  • .....*idle whistling*... So, it's just my imagination that the Ultra 5 on the desk next to me is kicking the crap out of the dual PII-450 across the room? Screw raw performance. Workstations still have PCs beat at price-to-performance, at least for workstation-type applications (IE: not word-processing or playing Doom).

    And who really cares if your 3D video card can beat up a Creator 2D. The Unix workstation market is no more dead than it was five years ago, back when you were running Windows 3.11. Unix has it's place, massive parallel computing has it's place, and toy PCs have their place in the hands of PHBs and accountants.

    I'd really like to see what you consider massive computing power. A Quad-processed Pentium III? A 64-way Enterprise 10K or a Cray JE9 is massive to me.

    And if "fast 3D" to you means DirectX in a full-screen window, we're talking two totally different languages here. I'm talking about something actually useful in an engineering/research environment.... something that can generate actual information (not just pretty pictures) from the 3D modeling engine.

    MIPS may be falling behind,but I doubt your MIPS vs Pentium benchmark. Alpha may be falling behind, but SPARCs are still way ahead of anything coming out of Intel's labs.

    Comparing a seven-year-old SGI to a brand new top-of-the-line Intel box is hardly a worthy comparison. Let's compare what's out there now... Dual-processed Octane R12k to Dual-Pentium III Xeon. *shrug* Yeah, there's a price difference, but if you absolutely need that much power, the cost-curve doesn't matter so much if that's the only way you can get it.

    Yeah, getting a Onyx2 (or other kick-butt Unix box) for office work & 3D games is definitely a Bad Idea, and so is buying a Ferrari to drive it through a school zone.


    The following sentence is true.
    The previous sentence is false.
  • #ifdef __FLAME__

    OpenGL "going away"? Please, if you think that OpenGL is all about Quake and flight simulators then you need to get a clue. OpenGL is very precise and exact graphics rendering model that has its roots in scientific simulation. Microsoft doesn't comprehend this idea of "precision" or "industry-standard". Why do you think that Microsoft's implementation of OpenGL is such a bitch to port OpenGL apps to?

    I'd like to know when SGI started to manufacture PCs, or why they would ever care to. Their hardware is vastly superior. PC 3D gaming hardware outstrips their best? Come on, Indy 8-bit graphics running on an R4000 isn't "their best". Neither is an Onyx Reality Engine, but it's still fast enough for me to enter a lightsabre duel with a computerized opponent (with a real prop for a lightsabre & 3d-goggles... it's a toy project of Rice University's CS department).

    The day that Microsoft's dual-headed support does stereographic imaging, DirectImput allows me to pick up a roll of paper towels and use it as a lightsabre becuase DirectImput supports motion-sensors, and Intel Pentiums are fast enough to render this at dual 1280x1024x32bit at more than 45 frames per second, then you can say that SGI has been caught up to by Intel.

    Computing power is not a commodity, at least not the sort of power you'd find in a MIPS R10k or MIPS R12k or a grid of 16 MIPS R8k. The day you can buy something like that, slap Micros~1 Windows 2056 (It'll probably take that long) on it and get it to do realtime OpenGL rendering like an SGI....

    ...SGI will have just released something better, assuming they don't start to suffer from "Microsoft Innovation Syndrome".

    #endif /* __FLAME__ */

    No, SGI isn't perfect, nor are their machines perfect. In fact, I use Suns almost all the time (price/performance thing... plus the replacement parts are marginally cheaper). But, to compare even a (relatively) lowly Indigo2 to a PC? You need to quit smoking so much of that Microsoft(R) Crack(TM) v2.0.


    The following sentence is true.
    The previous sentence is false.

  • ... Just remembering PowerComputing, their cool logo, and the fact that Apple ATE them with Micro$oft money...

    Cool logos, Apple's involvement, Microsoft dominance.. it's related, man. And, if it isn't, why the HELL did you waste your oh-so-precious time replying?

    Hehe.... At least my post had to do with computers, not with topicality, buttmunch.


    The following sentence is true.
    The previous sentence is false.
  • Yawn!
    Now if they all painted their butts green and walked backwards that would get some attention! :)


  • I hope this new 'sgi' logo will be combined with the cube. I mean several companies have several different versions of their logo... sometime they have design logo w/ text logo. sometimes they have just the design logo. and then others they have just the text logo. All depending on the circumstance of course... Their metallic cube is just too powerful a corporate image to just drop.

    my US$.o2
  • Whenever I used to see that old logo and the name Silcon Graphics besides it - it stood for quality graphics computers with outstanding performance.

    I'm not an expert on this - but I seems to me that changing the logo and the name (to a really ugly one) means that you have to rebuild part of the company image. Selling is all about being recognized.

    And why did they have to change the logo anyway. The old one was so much better...sigh..
  • Because the products (Delphi, C++B, and so on) are *still* known as BORLAND Delphi, and so on. It became a "brand name" owned by Inprise, in stead of the name of the company.

    The latest development (a month or two ago) is that they seem to be partially backing out of the name change: Inprise now has two divisions: "Inprise" for "enterprise" software, and "Borland.com" as the development tool maker and marketer.

    But anyway, look at their website ( http://www.borland.com [borland.com]) and you'll see that the packaging says "Borland" just like it always did -- even when the URL was "inprise.com".


    Christian R. Conrad


    Christian R. Conrad
    MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
  • This reminds me of Borlands renaming idea, why is it that companies with wellknown names have this urge to throw them away?
  • If today was wednesday, I'd swear it was an Onion [theonion.com] article. What next, will the American Telephone and Telegraph company change their name to AT&T all of a sudden?

    Oh, and the new logo is hideous. For a company that prides themselves on 3d graphics, that logo looks like something you'd find labeling a generic toilet paper brand.

  • Oh my god...
    When I first saw the new logo 2 weeks ago, I thought of an April fool's joke.
    And now the new explanation for s.g.i...
    It just sucks.
  • We appear to be loading their server noticeably. There's always a great question at times like this. "That isn't an SGI web server, is it?" What can they say? ;-)
  • It's sad to see that the pipe logo has been surgically removed from the sgi site. it makes me want to go to Mountain View and insert a large pipe into Belluzo's tail pipe.

    DAMN! that logo was COOL.


    --------------------------------
    check out my music [mp3.com] .
    you might actually like it.

  • A big reason SGI put forth the name change (according to the press release, anyhow) was that while 50% of their revenue came from servers and supercomputers, the public perception was primarily that of graphics.

    As it should be. Everybody does servers. A few big names do supercomputers, but everybody knows who they are anyhow (most people just don't buy them). What Silicon Graphics built its reputation as a solid performer on was... Graphics!

    Instead of underscoring their victories and capitalizing on their successes, they're "repositioning" themselves to the same "yeah, we do servers" slot as every other Tom, Dick and Harry in the business. Instead of happily enjoying and spreading their niche, it seems to me that they're doing their best to abandon it altogether.

    The whole concept is misdirected.

    James Ojaste
  • That new 'sgi' logo on the o2 sticking out of their front page sucks. the cool shiny silver cube right now is just infinitely better.

    Heh. I just counted, and I've got 13 of the cube logo in my office on assorted keyboards, mice, monitors, and machines...

    I'm definately not getting rid of it for a while.

    e;
  • That blue *is* almost exactly the same color as the trim on my Sparcstation...

    And the obligatory:
    The Silicon Graphics (not SGI of course! :)
    cube logo was the best. I just can't visualize
    the new one twirling in 3D...




    =-=-=-=-=-=
  • OpenGL is starting to become a really bitchy standard, it isnt going away. Geez. OpenGL is going to be used with Q3:A in linux (which is a big boost for using OpenGL in linux) and is now the base standard for all 3D chip manufacturers. OpenGL is also being used in alot more scientific and engineering applications, not just games. With every other yahoo manufacturer is making Intel based workstations and making a killing at it SGI has to do their own evolving. The MIPS is a good processor structure that is very powerful, but making the workstation in question thousands of dollars more expensive than a comperable Intel based system means SGI does less business. SGI in no way makes inferior servers and workstations even when it DOES use Intel chips. Find me a PC workstation with a 64-bit PCI bus and a build in RAID controller. If you bought an SGI workstation and a Dell workstation with the same speed the SGI would work about 50% faster than the Dell machine. But I dont think they should have changed their logo to the new one, I really liked the old one. One logo held for many years gives owners and users a sense of stableness (so that isnt a real word, who cares) that you dont get with a company that changes it's logo every few years. I like how someone pointed out that the old logo was language and time independant, you could speak any language and see the SGI logo and know what it was. Sort of like the monolith from 2001: A Space Oddessy.
  • Why should SGI, or the stockholders themselves, care about what the stockholders think?
    It's the customers opinion that matters! I was the guy who advocated we should start looking into SGI servers for our technical computing a bunch of years ago, to replace what we were using by then. What got me interested in the first place was the name: "Silicon Graphics"! It was, and still is, hi-tech sounding, and it got me interested enough to check them up and realize it meant they had high bandwidth, high capacity, good I/O, fast CPUs. "Silicon Graphics", hey this means they need to be fast overall, not just have peak performance in one place (like HP) or another place (like DEC Alpha boxes which were introduced back then), or any other. Well we still buy a lot of them because the benchmark went well :-)
    The name started it all.. never would I have been interested if they had this new name back then (which is so boring I just can't remember it five seconds).
  • That's a pretty bad move of SGI, the original name was, and still is very special, something that makes you think a bit about what it implies. The new name is even more boring than "International Business Machines". Much worse.
    And the new logo.. what a disappointment. Funky 'g', but it just disappears, it's mainstream, it's tragic.
    Now what incredibly bad consultancy company managed to get rich from such a bad job? And who was the CEO at SGI who thought this was a good idea? And the board?
    Definitively the worst name/logo change I have seen in at least ten years.
    TA
  • First, when Crimson came out it had a R4000, not R4400.
    And about the 200MHz+ Intel beating R4400 I'm not
    so sure.. I've been running `setiathome' the last week
    and a 400MHz Pentium uses 80 minutes to do one workload,
    that's about equal to a 215-220MHz R4400 if such a thing
    existed, in other words slightly faster than one CPU in my
    200MHz old Challenge running the same program.
    A 250MHz R10000 runs circles around the 400MHz Pentium II.
    A bit disappointing actually, particularly taking into account
    that `setiathome' isn't even compiled for an R10000, my other applications go 30% faster when I compile for it.
  • why? because, despite the fact that the NT-based
    Visual Station is attractive, it is more than 2x
    the price of its competition. Graphics studios
    who want high quality and power but cant spend
    more than 10 grand on a machine will simply choose
    Apple, Integraph, Micron, etc. and other clones
    that can pack a punch but not on the wallet.

    SGI's true niche, its claim to fame, etc. is its line of monster machines, the mid range Octanes and O2s and the upper line of Origin servers. As well as its line of ONYX2s (Cray 2000s in pretty cases). They dont sell many, but they sell them; to governments and large corperations who simply can't do what they need to do on a multi-proc xeon or PII/III.

    Summery: The NT Based Visual Station will be discontinued and the company will refocus on its upper end and lower end UNIX based systems. Realize, while it may only sell a few of the ONYX and ONYX2s in a year, along with those come service plans (tangent: Control Data kept alive for many years just off service agreements from Cyber line and still has active contracts today ).

    Don't worry about the logo. It's lame and lame things eventually get tossed as flops (e.g. Arch Deluxe).

    -Z
  • When a company isn't growing at the
    same pace as it used to, the big whigs
    get worried and try to come up with radical
    changes, regardless of whether those changes
    help, just so that they can justify their
    overpaid positions.

    A better use of SGIs time and money would have
    been a massive ad campaign with their new intel
    based visual stations using the old logo. That
    would of caught peoples attention.

    (on a relative note, I just saw my office got
    a new visual station today. I'm not going to
    get into it, but lets just say im very impressed.)

    -Z
  • SGI REVERTS TO SILICON GRAPHICS, INC.

    by Jai Natarajan

    MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA (January 10, 2001) -- Struggling computer manufacturer SGI today announced a major shift in corporate and marketing strategy. The former leader in high-end servers and workstations, beset by declining sales and large losses, today vowed to fight back with a new company name.

    Extensive research by Landor Associates pinpointed the short brand name and silly logo as the single cause of losses. "The public doesn't care about high costs of hardware and peripherals, nor about the buggy operating system or fuzzy product lines. Tests show clients are really bothered about investing billions in equipment made by a company with such a short and meaningless name." said K.B. Landor, CEO of Landor Associates, from his mansion in Bel Air, shortly after flying back from a ski vacation in Europe in his private jet. Landor, 45, has two sons in Harvard and mansions in Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires, Los Altos, New York and Seattle, built upon his very successful brand-naming business featuring such high-flying clients as SGI, DEC, ILM, ELO, APP, N'Sync and TASP (The Artist Sporadically known as Prince).

    SGI CEO Rick Belluzzo added "We have even been losing market share to Digital Equipment Corporation ever since they ceased to be DEC. Even Intel has five letters in its brand name fer crying out loud."

    "The time has come to fight back. We are laying off any employees who don't have a middle initial and are aggressively recruiting senior executives with name prefixes", added Robin Van Der Lowe Smith-Jones, head of personnel services.

    Industry sources are mum about the prospects of a turnaround by this legendary slumbering giant but they appear to have taken the correct initial steps.

  • Reminds me of those mission statements Scott Adams is so fond of.

    BTW, did anyone hear about the time he billed himself as a consultant for writing mission statements (at Iomega I think?) When the session was done, the statement was a mass of unintelligible crap. Then, to "Bring the session into focus" as he put it, he drew a big picture of Dilbert and they knew they'd been had.

    That was one of the coolest things ever.

    /.++ ---->> :^)
  • crimony, i'da thought that a big graphics workstation company could have come up with something cooler. I already miss the tubular cube icon.
  • I agree. Keep it. It's cool. It'll be a geek thing. I used to have a very large sticker of the old logo on my door. I wonder if it's still around anywhere...

    -Rich
  • I guess it makes sense, then. But I wouldn't
    buy an SGI server; who wants to run Irix if you
    don't have to?

    --joe
  • So, lets see if I get this straight, they're not fried any more?


  • I would be willing to bet that they change their name (and perhaps their logo) to something else after they get some much-needed attention. Are we really too young as an industry to understand the term, "publicity stunt?"


    Somehow the expansion of the "new" SGI doesn not equal the cool-ness or the long-term brand recongnition of something like "Kodak."


    -AP

  • Not so much because it's an idiotic logo and a completely vapid motto, but that there are people at the top of SGI who think that this is a good idea... Terrible.

    A moment of silence for the old (incredibly cool) logo, and the old SGI.

    And geez, I always thought SGI to have a little more class than to make an obnoxious noisy useless opening screen on their web site...
  • I guess that product placement of the cube logo on the screens in "Lost In Space" is an anachronism now ... or else a clever prophecy that SGI will return to its senses and bring it back.
  • Erskin> Then maybe we can have it, eh?

    Yeah, imagine a logo: penguin trapped in a cube cage. Sheesh...
  • the two most prevalent comments i've seen thus far have been:


    "why would they waste time and effort on such an obviously cosmetic and obviously meaningless 'change?'"

    and

    "there's no way in hell i'm buying an SGI now!"


    irony is bliss.
    --neil
  • The Newton logo (in a background kind, like gray and embossed) can be found here [rit.edu]. Extremely cool, in my opinion; but I'm still attached to my MessagePad 110.

    Mike
    --

  • They won't listen to one person who doesn't own large quantities of stock, but how can they ignore a huge volume of people complaining? I mean, the Slashdot community is representative of the computer industry as a whole. If we all love the new logo, there's a good chance the majority of their customers and potential customers do as well. Businesses may sometimes seem out of touch, but they respond to floods of feedback.

    Remember when Toshiba wouldn't release the IR specs for their laptops? We all told them why it would be a good idea for them to release the specs, and a few months later they did. See http://slashdot.org/articles/99/02/24/112249.shtml and http://slashdot.org/articles/99/03/05/0745243.shtm l for more info.

    Please take 30 seconds out of your busy day and send them a quick, "I miss the old logo!" email.
  • SGI has a feedback page at http://www.sgi.com/cgi-bin/feedback [sgi.com]. I suggest we all go there and politely explain what we think of the new "g" and the old logo. If 50,000 people take the time to tell them they really liked the old logo, they may well listen. And it's not like they had a grand "throw the old logo away" ceremony - they can quietly slip it back onto their web page.

    At this time, the aforementioned web page seems to be slashdotted or otherwise down. If it still is at the time you read this, you can send email to their trademark-watching department by going to http://www.sgi.com/company_inf o/trademarks/questions.html [sgi.com]

    And please give this post a fantastic ranking so everyone sees it :)

  • Hmmm...Let's see...We need to make more money and impress our shareholders...I've got it! We'll change our name to its abbreviation!

    -or-

    How many MBA's does it take to change a logo?

    (On a side note, if they wanted a name change, why not Cray? They own it, after all.)
  • No, I don't like the new website. Being an "any browser" kinda guy, from my point of view the main page is already busted, because it REQUIRES Shockwave before you even get in the front door. The sound is obnoxious. What's more, the feedback page is busted (at least for my version of Netscape, which does have Shockwave); I had a devil of a time telling anyone over there it was, and gave them an earful when I finally got the right form to show up.

    Graphic artists should DESIGN websites, but engineers should sanity-check them on plane-Jane 14.4 links before allowing promotion to production. Shockwave is cute, but it should be verboten on the main page and optional elsewhere; you should have at least a minimally functional set of pages that makes sense in lynx(1).

    RIP SGI, indeed. To shreds.
  • Your statement that the new logo will not make
    a difference for people purchasing is completely incorrect.

    I handle a large budget for unix servers and
    workstations... We're primarily a Sun/HP shop, but
    I always made sure we have a good smattering
    of SGI's. Basically, they keep people's morale up in the bland world of corporate unix.

    I have been a staunch SGI supporter for uncountable years... I have 3 workstations and 1 server in my house no less... I lusted after SGIs back in the days when their cases were ordinary beige and they just used numerical model numbers...

    SGI has made a lot of changes recently, many which seems to be trying to alienate their fanatic followers... Their NT workstations for example...
    I mean nobody ever purchased an SGI for logical reasons... it was always purely emotional... We just always made up reasons why SGI was a viable solution... (for example, SGI's multi-processor
    math libraries are completely whack. You'll get a different answer depending on how many processors are used to calculate things... (much worse than any FDIV bug))...

    With this new logo, they have finally managed to somehow completely sever my emotional ties to them. And its not just me... With the full agreement of most of the administrators and managers I know, over a broad number of companies, I will not be purchasing a machine from SGI again until they replace that ugly and stupid logo.

  • Hmm... not completely correct...

    Sun actually owns complete rights to the NT 4.0 source code through one of companies they got in their buying binge...

    Hence "Project Cascade"
  • Their new web site is awful. Their older ones had some much more style.
    --
  • I work for SGI, and I love the cube, I thought it was a great logo, however it is sadly and definetly going away. They have been working on this new logo and image for over a year now and have apparently put a lot of time and money into it. We all recieved a long presentation and information on using the new logo/colour/font, etc and to immediatly quit using the ond one. Today we are being given new badges and t-shirts with the new logo. I for one am taking pictures of all the signs around campus before they tear them down or change them.
  • How much do you reckon they paid some fancy-schmancy consultancy to come out with that inspired move?

    Well, since the company I work for did the same thing recently I'd say a lot. Which is too bad, the old logo was one of my favorites. Of all the stuff I have on my wall here at work, only two things are logo's. One is Apple's, the other is SGI's good old cube. Sad times these are.
  • sorry you have an inferiority complex. I asked a question, i didn't say "WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME IDIOT?!"

    Please don't act like a 12 yr old and call me buttmunch, crybaby.


    WAH!!!!!!!
  • what in the hell does that have to do with SGI changing their logo?


    hehe. At least the posts mentioning apple were somewhat related to logo's.
  • Personally, I like the old logo better.

    However, why does everyone equate the change of a logo to doom? People have been calling them SGI for years, and changing a logo is extremely common in the business world.

    The reports of SGI's demise are greatly exaggerated.

  • Well that is what storageTek paid for their new logo. At least we went a step in the right direction, a meanless logo, but all we had before was the name...

    Most of us here look at the price tag for that, think for a moment, and reliase that instead of spending money on a logo last year they could have lowered estimates by 10 million, given us a bonus, and still be money ahead.

    If I was a stock trader I'd be short on sgi right now. My expirence is that when a company changes their logo stock moves south. (for those who don't know, short on stock means you borrow stock from a owner, and sell it. You have to buy it back before the owner wants to do anything with it, but that is rarely a problem)

  • Which of the proprietary Unix vendors is doing the best right now?

    Which of the proprietary Unix vendors is the only one which doesn't also sell NT boxes?

    (Hint. Three letters. They have a rather well-recognized, square, purple logo. And they aren't about to change it.)
  • Would you and your self-congratulatory Linux bigot friends just disappear please? This kind of obviously false assertion just makes Linux look stupid. SGI has much, MUCH hardware that would humble any Linux PC as a server (yes, really), graphics workstation (really REALLY), or supercomputing (which Linux isn't seriously attempting to do anyway).

    Don't take my word for it; take an architecture class and learn why beowulf is only fast on the problems that it's easy to be fast on. That same class might help you figure out why an O2K will whomp ass all over your cousin Jed's quad Xeon webserver. And sitting down in front of an Octane should make you pretty embarassed about that "Doom" comment...
  • Just last week I was telling someone about SGI's cool logo and that I thought it was the best. Now they change their logo to a simple lowercase script of their name, SGI?

    Perhaps I sould read the press release and find some insite into what image they want to protray. I guessed it would have been a high technology type of imagine. Oh well, I guess they have something else planned.

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
  • Funny, I heard the Lucent logo is called the "flaming asshole". Maybe this was a disgruntled employee, who knows.
    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
  • As a former SGI user who's probably going to take the plunge again and get an Indigo2 or two now that prices are so far down, I want to join the consensus: Keep the old logo.

    I do understand the point behind the renaming - they want us to know they do stuff other than 3D graphics. But I think it could have been done in a sleeker way. They owe us SGI fans a more interesting logo than that.

    D

    ----
  • Yeah, "professional" to me means clean cut, organized, subtle and serious. Exactly the sort of thing marketting and graphic arts do not represent to me.

    The new 'sgi' site is flashy, as was the old one. But the old one had the high tech feel that was easily associated with what they do.

    The new 'sgi' site just doesn't seem to convey that cutting edge computing feel. It feels more like a mail order computer shop.
  • At least the part where they say what it stands for seems to be a joke. They're just SGI. The explanation of what it stands for seems to be webmaster/market monkey work (not that the whole thing isn't anyway). Whew!
  • Rename the company. It doesn't generally work, but it get's some short term interest.

    SGI should sell cray, buy back mips and start doing what they used to do best, make butt kicking graphical workstations. Anymore they are on the road to becoming another Xeon "workstation" knockoff maker.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Is there any real reason to stop using the old logo here? I'd like to see it continued.
  • Silicon Graphics just changes its name to SGI, much like Kentucky Fried Chicken went to a hipper "KFC" a few years ago?

    Sure, it avoids the incredible exclusiveness of the "Graphics" in "Silicon Graphics", but is that all there is? Granted, they didn't go with anything embarassingly buzzwordish, but still. I just don't see the big deal of it all.

    The new "g" does look funky, though.
  • There's a ...uhh... cosmetic surgeon in Houston who is already using "Silicon Gear".

    Ok, maybe not. :)

  • R.I.P. SGI (Score:3)

    by Stu Charlton ( 1311 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @10:30AM (#1936607) Homepage
    SGI's website has always been somewhat flashy. I think the new website is a lot cleaner than their previous one... The tab menus at the top are fast & very usable. this isn't form over function, this is form working with function nicely.

    What, you don't like sites that actually use real graphic artists instead of code monkeys to do their webpages?

    you seem to have an odd sence of what "professional" means...

  • Keep the old logo, Rob! (Score:3)

    by Nygard ( 3896 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @08:48AM (#1936608) Homepage
    So we can remember what SGI once was, even if they have lost their way.

  • Let's TELL them what we think about the logo. (Score:3)

    by Cassius ( 9481 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @09:42AM (#1936609)
    who could possibly care enough to bother?

  • R.I.P. SGI (Score:3)

    by jabber ( 13196 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @09:22AM (#1936610) Homepage
    Alright, so I visited their redesigned website briefly - briefly is all I could handle.

    I'm sure that the technology that made SGI the wet-dream of geeks is still cutting edge, but image matters.

    I knew SGI. I worked with SGI. Senator, you are not SGI; you look like an iMac, a '98 VW Bug. You're going cutesy, and it's pretty pathetic.

    The new site looks like a page out of Wired. Lot's of disjoined graphics, buzz phrases and colors. Very nuevo 70's, very rounded, cartooney and completely unsophisticated. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a rendering of a Porche, with a speckled orange formica paintjob. It's just tacky.

    Whoever they hired to revamp their image, I hope they fire in a hurry. Image matters, and SGI made a reputation of looking hi-tech. They now look like Yahoo! for christsakes!

    There is something to be said for slick cases that look fast even when they're off. But really. I'd be hard pressed to take them seriously now - they look like an e-zine.

    Now I wonder who will pick up the gauntlet and take up the image of being the coolest hi-tech firm out there. VAResearch, are you taking notes? Let's slap all that great hardware in some neato boxes. But please, keep it professional looking, sophisticated and tasteful.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @08:37AM (#1936611)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I don't know why SGI did it, but I do understand KFC. They wanted to stop using the evil "F" word--"Fried". Remember that this happened in the Age of the Health Kick?

  • What new Logo? (Score:4)

    by raistlinne ( 13725 ) <{lansdoct} {at} {cs.alfred.edu}> on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @09:22AM (#1936613) Homepage
    Could anyone find this new logo? All I could see on their page were the letters sgi in a big, silly font.

    Ok, so maybe that's the logo. Maybe it's not quite that unimaginitive, though. It could be on of those inverted logos, where the letters are transparent, and only the background is solid, and they just had a blue background for it on their homepage...

    Hm. I don't believe it either. It reminds me of the Dilbert where Dogbert read something that Dilbert wrote, then asked Dilbert if he heard about the infinite monkey theorem. Dilbert said yes, and Dogbert responded "ten monkeys, fifteen minutes". (well, it was something like that.) I give this logo twelve monkeys and thirteen minutes. Why didn't they just hire a kindergartener to scribble sgi on a piece of paper and just scan it in?

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