Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE
According to Wikipendia, SGI's max value was $7B in 1995.
Sold for $25M within 15 years.
Wow.
That would have made a fascinating investigative book.
>From the 'And they lived happily ever after' bin:
"While SGI has met with an unceremonious end, one of its
founders has a new beginning.
The company was started in 1982 by former Stanford University
professor James Clark, who went on to found Netscape Communications
(since we're going down memory lane). Last month, Mr. Clark, 65, married
the Australian swimsuit model Kristy Hinze, 29."
(http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/once-mighty-sgi-sold-to-rackab
le-for-25-million/)
Bwana
How do you make a small fortune in aviation? ..... start with a big one!
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul
Martz
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 2:42 PM
To: [email protected]; 'OpenSceneGraph Users'
Subject: Re: [osg-users] SGI declares bankruptcy (UNCLASSIFIED)
As the British punk band The Stranglers used to say, "Everybody loves
you when you're dead."
Sure, SGI did some things pretty well, but let us not forget they also
did some things pretty poorly, and in my opinion were really not much
better or worse than many other hardware vendors.
Things they did well: OpenGL 1.0 was a masterpiece of design that took
the graphics world by storm and utterly crushed several other competing
APIs of the era. This is an API that is so well-accepted that it has
outlived its creator.
Things they didn't do well: Too much focus on the high end. Bad business
decisions. No focus on open standards until absolutely forced to do so.
Not able to keep pace with the industry (look where they are now).
And marketing faux pas... When OpenGL 1.0 first came out, SGI marketing
constantly repeated the notion that immediate mode was the most
important thing in the world. (This was a direct slam against the
PHIGS/PEX APIs, which were focused on retained mode.) At the same time,
SGI was promoting their 1.1 million triangles/second hardware. However,
all their demos had a performance HUD that clearly showed significantly
less than 1.1m tris/sec.
When pressed on this, they eventually published a benchmark that
demonstrated 1.1m tris/sec, but it used display lists. Oops.
Paul Martz
Skew Matrix Software LLC
http://www.skew-matrix.com
+1 303 859 9466
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g
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE
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