Silicon Graphics Inc. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The press release sugarcoats: "Silicon Graphics today announced that it has reached an agreement with all of its Senior Secured bank lenders and with holders of a significant amount of its Senior Secured debt on the terms of a reorganization plan that will reduce its debt by approximately $250 million, greatly simplifying its capital structure." El Reg, The Inq, and the WSJ have more.
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Member since:2006-01-12
SGI have been screwed since about 1998 or thereabouts, it's amazing that they have lasted so long. It was a major mistake trying to go into the Windows NT workstation market, a major waste of money which should have been put into developing Irix and their MIPS systems. The demise of the R18000 chip back in 2003 was really the final nail in the coffin for their IRIX kit that's for sure. Great systems and all but who can justify spending 18k on a graphics workstation when the graphics system hasn't been updated since 2002 (Tezro with Vpro12).
Likewise they didn't continue development of their heavy metal visualisation systems after IR4 (Infinte Reality 4 -- released bout 2002) instead bringing out the Onyx 300/350/3000 series with ATI gpu's. As we all know ATI drivers aren't that great whatever platform you tend to be on.
If they had stuck with what they were good with instead of going intel they'd probably be in better state today.
It's a pity, because IRIX is my favourite Unix out there, awh well c'est la vie.
Member since:2006-01-09
I hope that OpenGL lives on for a long long time to come. Brilliant technology and we should all go out and buy a copy of Mark Kilgards book on OpenGL. SGI had some great days but missed an opportunity to rethink and reinvent in the past 5 years.
Sadly .. the first thing that they do is steal from their own investors and only the "secured" banks get anything to pick from this sinking boat. So, dump your stock right away because its worthless today and has no provision for recovery in the near future.
"the Company believes that SGI's currently outstanding common stock and unsecured subordinated debentures have no value."
That really says it all .. almost.
This is the bitter pill to swallow :
"All of SGI's existing common stock and the unsecured subordinated debentures will be cancelled upon confirmation of the plan by the court and receive no recovery."
wow .. so the message is run .. run for the hills.
Member since:2006-05-09
And mourn for this once great company?
Yes, of course. Every time an innovative computer company gets into trouble, we all lose. The reason is that it becomes harder and harder to change the accepted paradigm. Our habits and ways of thinking are thus monopolized by the prevailing powers. Fortunately for us all, SGI is not dead yet. There is still hope that they may hang in there and go back to their former innovative and creative selves. My advice to SGI is the same one I give to Sun Microsystems:
Don't try to beat either Intel, Linux or Microsoft at their games. You will lose. I suggest instead that you do something that will take the rest of the industry completely by surprise. Invest your remaining resources and passion into the next big thing, the one thing that will solve the nastiest problem in the computer industry today: unreliability. Put all your money in non-algorithmic, signal-based, synchronous software. It will revolutionize both the hardware and the software industry and usher in the most dramatic change in computing since the days of Charles Babbage and Lady Lovelace. Don't say you weren't warned. ahahaha...
Member since:2005-10-08
> Put all your money in non-algorithmic, signal-based,
> synchronous software.
Or better yes, don't put your money in anything software based, since as soon as you make a breakthrough, you will find you can't capitalize on it anyway since the open source people will reverse engineer it, figure out how you did it, copy it in such a way that makes just enough changes to avoid getting sued for copyright infringement, and then give it away free, once again, reducing the monetary value of your capital and time investment to zero.
Again, this is why the whole idea that closed source software hurts innovation is a total FUD myth spread by the open source crowd. It is actually open source leaching of ideas that hurts innovation, since companies don't want to invest the millions of dollars and man-hours it takes to come up with innovative solutions when they know that the open source people will have a competing knock-off product in a year or two that will reduce the monetary value of their product to zero before they have even had time to reccover their expenses.
Member since:
2005-06-30
And mourn for this once great company? Anyone with any good commentary on this?