How Linux killed SGI (and is poised to kill Sun)
The fact that SGI was acquired by Rackable Systems for the sad sum of $25 million was big news on Wednesday only because most people had forgotten that the company, formerly better known as Silicon Graphics, still existed.
So what killed SGI? In addition to the rise of Nvidia and makers of other graphics chips that ran on cheaper hardware, it was bad choices:
Continuing to stick with its own chips, operating system, and hardware while the rest of the world moved to commodity x86 boxes. The adoption of Intel's Itanium chip, which remains a depressing joke of a product. … Read more