SGI has lost most of its customers to Wintel, Lintel, Sun, and IBM. You would have to be insane to buy a big SGI system today and not even know how much longer SGI will be around to support it. They publish roadmaps that they change at their leisure and they clearly have no idea what direction they want to take their company. They sell $10,000 desktop workstations that get the **** kicked out of them by Wintel boxes costing half as much, and of course nobody buys them, yet they continue to let these 700MHz dinosaurs linger in their product lineup like time capsules from the year 2001. They support open source, but they don't know why. They support Linux... but they support IRIX too (if you consider no major updates since 1997 "support")... It's like they can't decide what they want to do, so they try to do everything and hope that one thing or another works.
I bought an R4400 Indigo2 on eBay a few years ago that had IRIX 5.2 installed on it. The seller didn't know the root password... so I (with next to no knowledge of getting root on Unix systems, I assure you) exploited some totally stupid security hole that involved a suid root program, a buffer overflow, and /etc/passwd. In retrospect, that was pretty damn funny. IRIX and Indigo Magic seem ancient today, but they were very nice when they were still competing against Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7. For a while they even seemed poised to break through into the mainstream, with Photoshop and Illustrator and Netscape and RealAudio Player (hey, it was cool in 1995) all running natively. The hardware was always very high quality too, and very fast for its time. 150MHz in 1993, with 128MB of RAM and 8 geometry engines pumping out 300,000 polygons per second, all in a computer no bigger than a PC... yowza!
From what I remember, Ed McCracken presided over growth through the mid '90s as CEO until he resigned in the late '90s (after the debut of the O2/Octane/Origin series). The company was already running into trouble at this time. The guy who took over for him was Rick Belluzzo, who proceeded to dump the awesome cube logo and replace it with "sgi." Then he stuck MIPS and IRIX on the back burner, and tepidly embraced Intel and Windows NT. (Basically screwing over the entire customer base.) He left after a year and a half and went straight to Microsoft where he became President. Bob Bishop, a longtime board member took over for him at SGI and proceeded to do pretty much nothing. What SGI has learned too late is that while laying people off is an easy and fast way to stop financial hemmorhaging, it can have unexpected side effects, such as making it impossible to develop the very products that are the core of your business. Oops!
