SGI Sold to Rackable Systems for $25M, Conditionally

TG Daily ^ | Wednesday, April 01, 2009 | Rick C. Hodgin

[Revolting cat!]

Moore’s Law killed every mini, super mini and super computer company, and the last one (Sun) is hanging by a thread. All this for Windows Vista?

[ThePythonicCow]

SGI may still survive, as part of Rackable. It seems to have a couple of very rich, very persistent benefactors:

• Intel, which continues to want to seed the very high end with a few Intel processor based systems, and
• some agencies of the United States government who prefer to go unnamed, but require the worlds largest main memory systems.

The only signficant overlap of existing product or development lines between Rackable and SGI are on the lower end cluster systems. I suspect some SGI cluster engineers are looking over their shoulder and polishing their resumes.

[ThePythonicCow]

the last one (Sun) is hanging by a thread

Didn't I see a recent rumour that IBM was considering buying Sun?

[Revolting cat!]

Yep, that was just a couple of days ago, followed by dead silence.

[ThePythonicCow]

SGI was comprised of 1200 employees as of March 1

When I joined SGI in 1988, it had 1200 employees (or so -- my memory is fuzzy), and most of those ever hired at SGI were still there.

SGI peaked at over 11,000 employees, somewhere in the late 1990's.

When I left SGI last year, it was down to 1800 or so employees. It was an excellent company to work for, especially for high end computer design engineers.

My take is that it's downfall was that it succeeded all too well in the 1990's, attracting greedy upper managers who wanted immediate results and had little long term or consistent understanding of what would be a healthy business model for SGI.

[Betis70]

I figured Sun was on the way out when they started working on their HQ in the old Agnews Insane Asylum.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

My take is that it's downfall was that it succeeded all too well in the 1990's, attracting greedy upper managers who wanted immediate results and had little long term or consistent understanding of what would be a healthy business model for SGI.

IOW, management got victory disease, and lost their edge?