Fun with Silicon Graphics

Thursday, March 06, 1997 - The death of SGI is formally announced.

I'm the one announcing it. As I've said before, I tend to be about a year ahead on these things. In this case, I think I'm two years ahead.

Why is SGI dead? The reasons are simple:

1. Their machines cost way too much.
2. Their software costs way too much.
3. Their service costs way too much.

The O2 (and the Octane) were their last chance at introducing something competitive. The O2, by itself, without a support contract, and if it came with a cheap C++ compiler, might be a decent development machine. But why bother? You can get a Pentium with MMX and a 3Dfx-based accelerator, with gobs of memory, and tons of disk space, and your choice of peripherals, and a good C++ development environment, for half the cost. So what if O2 graphics can access system memory? So what if the Octane machine (which costs gobs more) can have two processors? You can have about four complete Pentium/Windows machines for the price of ONE Octane machine, complete with development environments and monitors and your choice of peripherals.

SGI is behind the power curve. The first piece of evidence was the $15,000.00 price tag for decent accelerated texture support. The second piece of evidence was the $13,000.00 price tag for a quantity-one R10000 processor. The third was the cost of an Octane system. And the final nail in the coffin is the price of support.

If you like your Microsoft products, you pay for upgrades - maybe a thousand dollars a year for everything. (Well, maybe two thousand if you really get everything.) If you like your Alias (i.e., SGI) software, you pay $12,000.00 per year.

Well, I'm stuck with my $100K+ SGI machine that can only do untextured shading, so I'll make the best use of it I can. First thing is to stop paying software maintenance for Alias. That will save me $12,000.00 a year. (Hey! I could afford four more full-blown Pentium systems!) I need to keep paying for hardware maintenance because there is no real secondary market where I can get parts on my own - and I'm not gonna pay SGI for parts if it breaks- sheesh! So I need hardware maintenance for insurance. Next, I'm gonna start writing plug-ins for Alias PowerAnimator, since after four years of trying, Alias' game support still isn't very good. For instance, their latest D3D export tool cranks out multi-megabyte files for the simplest things. Luckily they ship the source code, so I can modify it.

Boy, am I annoyed. My original reasoning for getting the machine was valid when I bought it - it enabled me to do things that I couldn't do on a PC without whittling away at 3DS which I refuse to do. But today the picture has changed. I can no longer recommend an SGI system to someone unless they have truly special requirements and they will be using it all day long, so it has half a chance of paying for itself.

So check back in a couple of years. I think you'll be reading a lot of articles in the press that resemble the articles you are reading about Apple right now as Apple disappears into the sunset.