End Of The Road For SGI

from the blip dept

Wed, Apr 1st 2009 8:17pm — Mike Masnick

Big tech companies never completely fade away. At some point, they get acquired for pennies. But, even so, SGI is one of the "big names" that really came about as close to simply fading away as any I can remember. Just this past weekend, I got into a discussion with someone who asked if SGI was even around any more... and just like that, comes the news that SGI filed for bankruptcy protection (yet again) just as it announced that it's being acquired by Rackable for just $25 million. For a company that was once considered a massive darling of Silicon Valley, it's quite a quiet ending. At least the company didn't go into full-on patent litigation as it had threatened to do a couple years ago...

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Filed Under: bankruptcy
Companies: sgi

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Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 2 Apr 2009 @ 2:26am

Litany of Failures
Man, it’s unbelievable the number of wrong decisions they made: their first move away from Unix was to bring out a range of Windows-NT-based workstations ... that cost three times what other NT machines were selling for. And then when they finally embraced Linux, they hitched their sails to Itanium, which was supposed to leave x86 for dead, but which ended up way overdue and underperforming, and never recovered from that bad start.

That being said, all the other proprietary Unix vendors seem to have hit extinction too. Except for Sun, which has been circling slowly towards the plughole for a long time...
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Archer0911, 2 Apr 2009 @ 5:31am

:(
It's a sad day.
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Aaron Martin-Colby (profile), 2 Apr 2009 @ 7:26am

Sad
Very sad. They could have been so much more if they had just adjusted to the changing graphics market. You'd think that the emergence of consumer-level graphics acceleration like Rendition and 3dFX would have given them a hint of what was to come, but no.
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another mike, 2 Apr 2009 @ 12:05pm

old poker players never die, they just shuffle off.
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