Sadly, this is no April Fool’s joke. Silicon Graphics, the high-end computer computer workstation and server company founded by Jim Clark in 1982, today declared bankruptcy and sold itself to Rackable Systems for $25 million plus the assumption of “certain liabilities.” In its bankruptcy filing, SGI listed debt of $526 million.
A decade ago, SGI’s revenues peaked at about $4 billion a year. Now it will be lucky to make one tenth of that, with a revenue run-rate of less than $400 million, and its losses are piling up. Rackable’s stock is down nearly 7 percent on the news. SGI’s high-performance, highly-proprietary, computing systems fell victim to the spread of cheap Linux boxes hooked up together with massive redundancies.
You don’t build Web-scale services on expensive proprietary boxes. You build them on cheap, open-source systems. Just ask Google (or Amazon or Salesforce or anyone else).
April fool
From http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/04/hp-said-to-be-considering-android-for-netbooks.ars?comments=1&comment_id=113003697931
“The web is a waste of time on April 1.”
Truer words were never spoken.
If it really is a joke Rackable must not be laughing cos their stock is defo down 8% :)
This is no joke, and as information comes out it’s looking even stranger.
Rackable’s not actually the buyer at this point, but they’re in prime position to buy it. Everyone else has 25 days to step up and make an offer, after which Rackable gets all of SGI’s holdings, but _none of the debt_.
http://www.vizworld.com/tag/sgi/
sounds like a good deal
Clayton Christensen knows what’s up.
The Torvalds Effect
OSS FTW!
Maybe Seeqpod will do the same thing! All these bankruptcy companies are probably a result of the downturn.
ha ha ha ha ha ha…
You guys…you’re slaying me
You made one mistake: SGI uses Linux for their operating systems, so the problem wasn’t a proprietary OS.
One of their many mistakes was selling *expensive* open source systems.
I don’t think this is a joke, AFAIK.
This is sad news. I remember playing around with one of these machines in my father’s lab when I was a kid and it ROCKED back then.
To those in the know: Rackable is doomed too.
We have been using Rackable servers, they are the worst in the industry- unreliable, no warranty support, nothing.
Our reseller just switched away from them to a major brand, citing that they want to quite before they go out of business.
Very Sad. I still remember our SGI stations at the Royal Academy of Technology in Stockholm. Those were the days!
RIP SGI!
Selling proprietary crossbar technology to Sun Microsystems and not embracing Enterprise Solutions and Services early enough (circa 1997-98), exhibiting arrogant behavior towards partners and distributors, and having a ‘cowboy’ salesforce may have something to do with the demise of once-great engineering company (Cray Research included). As a former SGI employee, it bleeds my heart to have them go like this.
Agree with Alex and can attest to the arrogance and salesforce as far back as 1985 when I was there.
So many years for SG in the business
Out of MYvosi LLC, comes the face of Web 3.0, Maurice Valentino. Valentino never thought that out of his humble past that he would soon be the creator and innovator of the newest web technology that positions him to become the next Internet billionaire.
The Firm United LLC, which is a holding company for several companies including MYvosi LLC which houses Valentino’s genius creation, Myvosi Web 3.0, the wave of the future.
Myvosi Web 3.0 is a media/data exchange tool, a search engine that gains knowledge of the user the more it is used. It can be used for networking, it offers the most up to date encryption for product being sold/personal information and has a virtual mall with a presence of 250,000 national and international vendors in contract.In addition to your own personal virtual assistant that controls your every experience desire.
“It will challenge us and move us into the future now,” says Valentino. The site offers human deductive reasoning and inference. “Imagine a machine with personality that’s proactive,sounds like efficiency to me.” states The Face Of Web 3.0(Maurice Valentino).
Valentino also went on to explain in more detail what to expect from MYvosi LLC and Web 3.0.”MYvosi Web 3.0 is the successful marriage of artificial intelligence and the web. In addition we want to be efficient not only from an economical and an environmental perspective but also from an individual and technological perspective. Web 1.0 was for all to read, Web 2.0 was for all write and Web 3.0 is and will be for all to innovate.” personalize your future, live out your potential. Myvosi web 3.0 allows you to search by sentences not eliminating the keyword based search but expanding on it. You can type in sentences and in turn it would return relevant results and suggest other content related to your search terms. You can ask your browser questions such as “where can i go for lunch” and it will provide you, based on your likes & dislikes something suitable (human deductive Reasoning).”Many fear that this detailed information about them will be exposed, but it is the exact opposite,” says Valentino. Your likes and dislike /personal information are not publicized they are on an encrypted network using the same encryption’s as the one used by the major banks in the world(ex. the TLS and the high 128 bit encryption). This graduates the common concept of the current web, typing in the same information and getting the same information. What’s now offered is a unique individual experience on the web tailored to fit you personality. Myvosi Web 3.0 consist partially of “mashup” applications. An example would be looking up restaurants and have it tie in to another application(GPS) giving you place and directions. Myvosi Web 3.0 has the most intelligent software agent at the click of a button. You can share data files securely and efficiently without the threat of viral and other harmful applications (worms,Trojan horses,malware,etc) infecting your computer.A quote from Thomas Chille” For manifesting a web 3.0, we need a web 3.0. We need a real evolutionary shift in the perception of the web by the end users. Much like the paradigm shift in involving the user generated content for web 2.0.” Its purpose is to educate, create, and innovate the end User’s experience of the Web’s resources. It is the web’s Advanced Version Of the 3 dimensional giant”Second Life,”but Extremely user efficient. The applauding moment was simply this stated by The Face Of Web 3.0 “Most importantly Web 3.0 Is all of you. It isn’t the dominating player with the most Bank. It is about you (the user). We as individuals craft web 3.0. we all have a major role in its implementation” says Valentino. This is just an overview what Myvosi Web 3.0 offers. The detailed version would require a 1,000 paged text book and far superceeds what was said today. Myvosi Web 3.0 launch date is in the summer (July) of 2010.
Special Acknowledgments:
*Barack Obama in his spirited aura of change
*Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau who created the World Wide Web at CERN
*James Hendler An artificial Intelligence Researcher
*Nigel Richard Shadbolt founder of the Web Science Research Initiative
*Ora Lassila a Finnish computer scientist
*Computer Science University of Southampton
*Artificial intelligence department @ University of Edinburgh
*Eric Schmidt CEO Of Google
*Doug Lenat Computer Scientist Ceo of Cycorp
*Kevin Kelly Great Mind
If I left anyone out you are not forgotten, but for the sake of time, many more I give thanks to. Thank you all for your research , your time invested in making us better and more efficient economically and environmentally, America and the World thanks you.
A few pioneers of Green Energy who deserve recognition
*Scott mcnealy co founder of sun micro systems say that technology of the Internet is the most planetary efficient way of conducting business
*John Doer partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers
says that Germany is the largest buyer of solar cells around the world
“These are point that should be noticed and implemented in our economic and environmental strategy and conducive to like such recovery” Says Valentino
*MIT chemist Daniel Nocera
*Thomas Hinderling innovator who wants to build solar island to make us more efficient.
*Texas oilmen like T. Boone Pickens started pushing alternative energy
*Steven Chu head the Department of Energy
just to name a few.
“These are a few of the people who have inspired me to offer the Next generation ready platform. I look at their stories and their desire to innovate and to make better. These are things and mindsets I was conceived in. These Great minds gave me the foundation to start myvosi and change the future. So I personally feel they deserve a great deal of recognition” Says The Face Of Web 3.0 Maurice Valentino
Sounds more like ‘the arse of web 3.0′
Sgi was a great company. I worked there from 89 to 2004.
Yes it was arrogant when it was successful. But it was also a lot of fun to work there. Interesting mix!
Yes it made many mistakes, as far as 1993 (remember it took 2 years to create a new hardware product back then), and finance started to go bad in 1995.
One stupid mistake was to refuse to sell 3d chipsets for the pc market. Sgi would be as successful as nvidia if it had not made that mistake.
before Sgi I worked for Apollo (disappeared into HP)
My current company is not doing so well these days.
…
I was just saying the same here. At one point SGI had virtually all the talent in 3D know-how. Heaps of NVIDIA and ATI engineers come from there. Big mistake not to use that talent to scale the business, and to keep with the workstation and server mindset.
Lately I passively followed SGI, but really could not honestly see anywhere the company could go. It has been stuck creating highend, expensive servers of questionable interest to anyone, and with the bulk of the 3D talent elsewhere.
I’m sad to see SGI disappear into a semi-no-name company. The brand was so strong, yet it’s been diluted over and over in the last decade. I remember working in ‘95 for a visual effects and 3D dataset company in Utah. We had a dozen SGI’s all leased (too $$$ to buy) and felt we were the bleeding edge of graphics tech. Who else here played multiplayer doom with webcams after hours on $90,000 machines in the 1990’s?
Sad.
Salesforce actually built their service on expensive proprietary boxes. I can’t believe techcrunch got this wrong.
SGI’s mgmt cluelessness was evident in that they had a voicemail, not email, culture. If this is happening at your firm, get out. Now.
Does this include the IP of Cray? The 3-letter agencies may have pulled a Google and gone to loads of cheap hardware, but for a long time (I think) Cray, and then SGI was selling the government a lot of Crays, and then (I think) not reporting the income in the usual way to keep the nation’s intelligence computing capability a secret. At least, that’s what I heard from my sister’s hairdresser’s mom.
Someone please open source all their code before it is lost forever.
Sadly it seems none of you people bagging out SGI have ever owned one or have any clue…
Here’s some stuff that SGI invented that’s worth of mention…
- OpenGL and the first hardware accelerated 3D. Led the way to DirectX and 3D for the mass market.
- NUMA link – an extremely high bandwidth, low latency interconnect
- Systems that scaled to 1024 processors in a SINGLE OS instance (not distributed)
- Hot-swappable everything (including video cards)
- XFS – an extremely robust, fast journaled file system that got ported to Linux
I will miss SGI!
The fall of SGI is due to the rise of open source solutions. SGI is a dinosaur, but Techcrunch writers need to understand that web servers and servers related to websites (db, app ) are just a fraction of total server sales.
I will forever miss SGI and its “beautiful computing”. Here is my homage:
http://www.visionsofzen.org/blog/amitbasu/2009/04/sgi-and-the-death-of-beautiful-computing/