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Silicon Graphics

Belluzo post-SGI joining Microsoft 63

Posted by Hemos from the better-options dept.
Well, it apparents that on the heels of yesterday's announcement about resigning as CEO of SGI, Belluzzo will be reportedly joining Microsoft's interactive operations units.
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Belluzo post-SGI joining Microsoft More

Belluzo post-SGI joining Microsoft

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  • Not much loyalty in this computer malarkey is there?
    Chris Wareham
  • so, now we see why he's been driving sgi into the ground...heh
  • Or should that be 'assimilated'? All these anti-microsoft metaphors can be hard to keep track of.
    As for 'loyalty'; much as I dislike microsoft, I think I'll have to leap to the poor chap's defense. I wouldn't work for Microsoft (again), neither would a bunch a people on the list, but that doesn't mean everyone feels the same way. Even if he worked for SGI, we can't assume he feels the level of antipathy some of us do.
    Most ms employees are perfectly decent people (although when I was there, none of them knew how to use windows).
  • So what are the chances that he'll steer microsoft into the gutter and tell them to start using linux instead of NT? ;)

    ~Tim
    --
  • Did he retuire because he didn't liek the way that SGI is going non-M$?

    I think so.
  • ,p>

    I've always wondered why MS can't seem to make a decent, stable product. Your comment:

    ``Most ms employees are perfectly decent people (although when I was there, none of them knew how to use windows).'' (emphasis mine)

    I guess that might explain it, eh? If they can't even use their own product...

  • First thought "Traitor, begone!" :-)

    Second thought: "Microsoft takes care of its own" - Rick B supported the NT strategy in support of MS, it didn't work, Microsoft gave him a position.

    Third thought: What kind of position is this? Would you want to be put in charge of MSN et al? It may be an important position from Bill's point of view, and it probably pays pretty well, but frankly I don't think anyone human could fulfill Bill's expectations for the unit.

    Maybe Rick just got what he deserved.

    D

    ----
  • He is smart. He knows were the money is. He also knows were the future is as well.
  • I assume by "solid ride" you mean M$'s web division? I'm implying that from context, mind you, not because that statement represents reality in any way.

    M$ has utterly trashed every web venture it's gotten itself into. Does anyone here like the hotmail redesign? No one I know likes it. What about sidewalk.com? That used to be a good resource, until M$ took it over and "improved" (read: bloated, commercialized every square inch of, and generally made wreckage of) it.

    This move makes me hope that Belluzo had a plaque for his desk that says "Captain of Sinking Ships." Watch for M$ to lose even more money on their "interactive services division" and pin it on this shlub in the very near future.

  • Perhaps he was contacted by MS to help them deal with the Linux-threat and they need someone to help them out with multimedia anyways. He accepts because he will probably receive a lot of stockoptions and better get them now before the MS shareprice sinks, ie. a path to a good life with a good pension. This is of course pure speculation :-)
  • if he gets his stock now, and the share price sinks later, wouldn't that be a *bad* thing? Maybe I'm stupid, but I thought that was how it worked :)
  • The individual's needs must be secondary to the needs of the majority

    That's the microsoft design ethos. A bastard variant of democracy - you'll get what the pig ignorant masses want. So quit whining, and welcome to the neo-liberal hell of the future.

    Make me glad I'm an elitist bastard.


    Chris Wareham
  • I meant that he would then sell them while they were high-priced (I can't make myself say that they have a high-value ... oh, I just did, but I didn't mean it! ;-) and then just live off whatever high salary he supposedly gets until he doesn't care about the job anymore. He could pick up playing golf.
  • I'm sure this falls into the category, somehow. Or maybe psychological torture.

    I wonder if Microsoft offered Belluzo immunity from rabid SGI buyers, out for blood after the NT fiasco.

    Alternatively, it's just possible that Bellizo belives in Microsoft and it's software, and rebelled against the introduction of Linux and the abandoning of NT. Executives of companies have quit in the belief that 20th century technology was supplied by aliens, so it's not an outrageous possibility, as bizare as it might seem.

  • Microsoft founded Sidewalk - it was a Bill creation since Day One. I never liked it - I thought it was a soulless version of the Yellow Pages.

    But it was Bill's.

    Nonetheless, in spirit I agree with you - Microsoft has done little of genuine interest in the online world, and the news is filled with their retreats. Sidewalk, for instance, is now mainly folded into former competitor CitySearch.

    D

    ----
  • And why do you not step forward and reveal yourself in your very asshole way of responding?
    Why do you think that dealing with the interactive unit is all he will be doing when he apparently has so much more to bring to a technologically weak company?
  • I wish him as much luck as he had with SGI!
    A few months ago, some SGI salesman offered us some of their NT stations. I naively asked if they ran under Linux. The guy was slightly upset and told me that since they sale their NT boxes, everyone is asking about Linux. They cannot put anything else than NT since they have a contract with M$ for this little boxes.
  • In light of his second career decision -- the one to go to work for the borg -- I'm don't believe he is the right person to head SGI either!

    I do wonder how exactly he meant the statement that he was going to work for a company that doesn't compete with SGI. :)
  • I find it interesting and humorous to read the numerous posts and replies on slashdot. Among the many consistent themes are the conspiracies and conspirators that progagate throughout the tech industry. This theme is running on all cylinders with this story, the spectrum covers Belluzzo running SGI in the ground on purpose to a multifaceted attack on Linux by MS.

    Before going further, let's agree on one thing: Belluzzo resigned from SGI for a presumably better position elsewhere in the industry... MS according to many reports.

    Please take a second to humor me and consider the recent resignation of SGI's Belluzzo from your own career perspective.

    1) let's say that you are employed by a company who is struggling to survive, much less take a leadership position, in a stale industry with low margins and fierce competition.
    2) you are approached by the leading company in a high profile, media sexy, and wealthy industry.
    3) further, you are approached to be the head of a division (essentially a company unto itself) that is struggling to overcome identity and marketing issues, but has the full commitment and resources of its wealthy parent company. In other words, this is a challenge but is doable.
    4) you are enticed with cash and stock wealth of much higher certainty than your current position.

    What would you do? It's not about loyalty or conspiracy, it's about a fundamental tenet of market economies... freedom to exercise choice
  • I do wonder how exactly he meant the statement that he was going to work for a company that doesn't compete with SGI. :)

    A lot of companies, as a condition of being hired, prevent you from going to work for a direct competitor within a certain time frame after leaving. That's probably why he made that statement.


  • I was wondering what was up with SGI making NT based systems. What a crack headed idea that was. Looks like he's been MS's bitch since day one.

    ~Kevin
    :)
  • I'll humor you (he-he) and I agree with your line of thought in general. However, I don't understand how you can say "stale industry ... and fierce competition"? If there is fierce competition, how can the industry be considered stale, and what industry are you thinking about specifically, and how is it different from the industry of MS? I know that SGI sells system-hardware and MS doesn't, but I consider them both to be in the computer industry.
    Please elaborate.

  • This guy is a manager. He probably spends his time trying to figure out how to next "reinvent his company", or reading "Zen and the art of mind fucking the customer" or some such nonsense. These people have no morals or virtues. They don't mean anything. Managers spend their lives in the perpetual illusion that they matter. Who cares.

    If Bill Joy left Sun for MS THAT would be disturbing.

  • as an unix sysadmin with experience with irix, i take severe issue with your assertion that irix is non standard unix. it is KNOWN for being very vanilla unix. irix needs to be defended against baseless accusations, it has been one of finest variants of unix that i have been involved with. it is such a good thing that sgi is contributing amazing technology (xfs, and graphics optimizations) from their irix platform to the linux community. sgi's accomplishments are seen not just in the hardware world, but in the software side as well as seen in irix.
  • Nah, I see it more like this: The world didn't really want SGI NT boxes but this guy liked NT and believed in it and convinced the rest of the company to do it - but when the world didn't buy it, he took the rap for it. If he really does like Microsoft and NT and believes that it was a good direction for SGI, then it makes sense that when SGI turfed him, he'd want to go work for Microsoft.
  • stale in the sense that the hardware side of tech is evolutionary at this point in time. Computers get faster and have more of "things" (storage, memory, etc.). But hardware is hardly innovative in the mainstream.

    The software industry had become stale, in my opinion, but the Internet is driving significant change. Software is becoming less a product and more a service. The shift is dramatic, revolutionary to some segments. This is exactly why the Microsoft interactive services opportunity is so important to them... it's the platform that they plan to drive their next generation of services (revenues) through.

    hardware is fiecely competitive in that price sensitivity is high and has forced margins to be pretty thin. It could also be considered more competitive in that players are consolidating and creating larger power positions and far reaching competitive pressure for lesser players, of which SGI is clearly one of.

    Referring to the computer industry as a single industry is analagous to referring to the transporation industry or energy... it doesn't work. SGI and MS are in completely different segments, which are distinct in almost all facets.

  • YAACWHBBBM$ (yet another AC who has been brainwashed by M$)
    WOW, so Microsoft can take someone else's designs and (feebly)attempt to improve on them. Lets take a closer look shall we, sports fans?
    Expedia: Well, I'll be damned if it isnt Travelocity.com with a powered by M$ sticker on it.
    MSNBC: wait a minute, you mean that M$ does the news too? I seriously doubt that they would ever put a spin on anything on that channel. It's called mindshare...any place that they can put their name into they will. Last I checked M$ is a bunch of programmers and marketing people, they are not reporters. They bought a station and a website so that people would recognize the M$ name.
    Slate: The stuff that they forgot to put into the MSNBC channel
    Carpoint: Wow, another original M$ idea, selling cars on the internet. A search on Altavista for "car dealers" only returns 28,416 returns. Another M$ original production.

    Who cares about Sidesquawk and all the other M$ crap that they have crea^H^H^Hcopied. The point of the article in this is that M$'s brainwashed little boy that they planted inside of SGI failed in his conquest to assimilate them. So now M$ is taking him back for reprogramming and is probably going to send him out again in a couple of months once the brainwashing is complete.
    If you are going to post about proM$ stuff, check you references, M$ is NOT #1 in those websites. If you are going to get something wrong, at least get it right.
    ------------------------------------------ --
  • Noe. Noe, it can't be.

    This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.

  • Maybe Micorsoft will drop NT too?

  • I Think you are misunderstanding/misusing the word stale when you mean that it is now a commodity. And please don't say that hardware isn't inovative, even in the mainstream :-) Much larger harddisks, new types of interfaces, eg. I2O, USB, firewire are appearing, larger CDROMs (DVD) and what have we. This is not "stale", because that means that it isn't moving anymore and nothing could be further from the truth.

    But becaus eit is much more open with interfacing between various components it has become much more of a commodity industry and that is why it is so fiercely competitive. If you can't deliver a product with good performance you wont get a good price if you can sell it at all.

    Not all hardware is a commodity yet, though, and has a thin margin. Ask Intel how much their earnings are compared to their investments. Ha sit sunk below 50% and is it perhaps because of growing competition from a very innovative company called AMD? You see? :-)

    When you say the "software industry had become stale" I wonder when you mean that was? The internet started a while ago, but didn't get the tremendous growth until the 90's so let me assume you mean until then. If you think the software industry had become stale then, you haven't been exposed to a lot of software in that period. A lot of innovation was going on, eg. SMP on smaller machines (HW and SW) was becoming very interesting and incidentally the first 2CPU Microcomputer wasn't made in the Americas, but outside so if you only know about that continent that is perhaps why you didn't see all the innovation :-) (The company was called DDE, Dansk Data Elektronik and received a lot of guests from the US wondering how some other country's people could be before them ;-)

    I don't see the HW industry consolidating in general, but I see a lot of movement with shifting around of companies' ownership, but also smaller companies starting up. So nothing has really changed.

    If I need to discuss issues about data-processing and moving and storing of data on a larger scale I believe I will have to talk about a "computer industry" because there would be a lot of players and I wouldn't know who to exclude.

    Your "transportation industry" is also a good example, because if I am a politician or a CEO of a large company with many thousands employees and I need to build a new factory or close another one down, I will need to talk about a lot of different types of vehicles and that could come pretty close to talking about the whole transportation industry, eg. I need ships to dock and load/unload there (who do I atlk to?) I need some aviation possibilities there because saefty and speed will become important, and employees need their cars, and they need to park, and we need trucks to transport stuff to and from this train-station that carries this heavy goods back and forth.

    So, try not to focus so hard on the apparent subject at hand that you instead get tunnel-vision :-)
  • it seems that the preoccupation with money rests solely in your post. Considering that you seem to have missed the other points in my original post, let me restate them:

    - shift from hardware to the Internet sector
    - move from a market laggard to a market leader
    - take on a division that has not met expectations, but has the full resources of a capable parent company

    There is much more to the game than money, like winning.
  • I have the balls to put my name to my postings... I didn't see yours...

  • Hmmm ... this may be a bit cheeky coming from a computer contractor like myself, but I have to disagree.

    Some of the smartest people in the computer world are still working on the same projects or for the same companies many years down the line. From the early Unix era look at Kernighan, Ritchie, etc. Then there are people like Knuth, James Clark and Larry Wall. All hacking away at their personal masterpieces.

    As for the smart IT people you seem to be referring to, they are most likely materialistic contractors working on small scale, repetitive projects or on bug fixes to old systems.


    Chris Wareham

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