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You mean... IBM is the next?! OMGWTFBBQ

P.S.: you'd better check the history of SGI. The linux transition came too late, and after being backstabbed by MS on an agreement to share technology and release SGI Windows NT workstations.

MS stabbing someone in the back?! That never happens. I hope they find the leadership they need to pull themselves out of this immense hole their in.

For some reason I feel gutted about this. They were always the shiznit in graphics...

Linux transition came too late?
More like it came way too early for it to be a viable path to go at all.
Blame other companies all you want, but SGI's demise is their own doing.

Please, learn to read darling; he pointed out that converting to Linux to solve financial problems isn't the solution, the panacea that will deliver rocketing profits overnight; if you're crap without Linux, you'll still be crap after adopting and basing the whole business model around it.

The fact remains, SGI went for the wrong team; they went Itanium but had no well known, high profile operating system to bolt ontop of it - Linux STILL has things lacking that are available in commercial UNIX's.

SGI would have been better off, for example, working with SUN to port Solaris to Itanium or POWER and concerntrating on their bread and butter - but personally, I think the biggest mistake was the move to Itanium; POWER would have been a better choice, coupld that with NUMAFlex and Solaris, and you would have all the ingredients for a great machine.

They also failed to see the writing on the wall, NO ONE, I repeat, NO ONE is going to pay $14,000 for a workstation that performs worse than a run of the mill x86 workstation and worse, lacks software that is supported by the vendor to a decent level.

Add that the fact that SGI had no big players on their ISV books - hell, its been atlest 2 decades since Adobe released something for Irix, little wonder the niche has been getting smaller; there are only a small amount of niche markets before they're flooded - sorry, its either that they join the mainstream, with a dabble in the niche markets; no company can survive simply going for small fry; SUN has learned that, and are FINALLY getting out there and realising that EVERYONE is their customer, not just a handful of loyal clients.

s/Linux/Itanium/

They failed because they went Linux...

Wrong little MS astroturfing buddy. They failed because they went with Windows NT in the mid 90's after apppointing a MS backed saboteur as CEO, who had just left HP after nearly destroying UNIX there on behalf of his masters in Redmond. He went on to become a V.P. at MS but he was of little use to them there so they dispensed with him like a pair old dirty socks.

Linux was SGI's only hope after that mess

Linux could neither help nor harm SGI, since its problems had nothing to do with using Irix, NT, or Linux. SGI like the other major UNIX workstation and server vendors, saw an artificial demand during the bubble and a subsequent rapid erosion as the bubble waned. When purchases were made the costs associated with the niche hardware were unpopular with the new-found frugality of technology companies, and "good-enough" x86 systems emerged on the workstation market with superior compute-performance and significantly cheaper nVidia video cards with firmware optimized less for gaming and more for CAD, and in the server market with price/performance savings. It doesn't matter if large margins are obtained from hardware strategies with technical advantages if those advantages are only necessary for a niche whose volume is insufficient for meeting the overhead associated with operating a company that has scaled its operations under the assumption that the dot com era would never end. SGI, like most other UNIX vendors did this, and suffered tremendously as a result. Attempts to recover have met with less than stunning success.

Please, a shot in the back of the (empty) head for Marcellus..