Earlier this month, Jim Clark, the 65-year-old maverick entrepreneur well known for starting companies such as Netscape and Healtheon, tied the knot with 28-year-old Australian supermodel Kristy Hinze. The odd coupling mirrors today’s strange agreed-upon wedding of Clark’s first major company, Silicon Graphics (s SGI) and the little-known server-making upstart Rackable Systems (s RACK). SGI filed for bankruptcy and was agreed to be sold to Rackable for $25 million.
As a beat reporter, I covered SGI pretty closely. I remember the company’s foray into the “Information Superhighway” and how its coolest-looking machines helped create Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park.” SGI was cool, in an Apple (s AAPL) sort of a way. It had some of the smartest engineers and had a feeling of counterculture, which has slowly vanished from the Valley. I remember writing about the company giving up on its own version of UNIX and adopting Windows NT (s MSFT).
A series of management blunders and teutonic tectonic shifts in the technology landscape turned this once proud bastion of engineering into a historical footnote. And, as of today, even that is no more.
It’s tectonic shift. The Teutonic Knights can be blamed for a lot of things, but not for death of SGI 🙂
I seem to recall around the time SGI was starting to release windows machines ( around ’97-’98 IIRC ) they were suffering a brain drain of 3D engineers. I believe many ended up at Nvida, which then produced the first geforce chip in ’99.
Looks like a smart move on Rackable’s part. Getting >$350MM/yr in sales. If they can replace SGI’s CoGS with Rackable HW and elim a great deal of SG&A, then they’ll probably change the profitability profile of the deal dramatically. Plus, gives them a big position in HPC and potentially Cloud.
I agree… there is a lot of debt they have to assume and of course they would have to fix SGI. But they are now a serious threat to Sun and Dell.
They’re actually not going to assume *all* of the debt. Saw a note somewhere that they’re only picking up a portion. Not sure how that works when you’re giving equity value…
I remember when the first workstations arrived in England during the early 80s. Then the main players were HP, SUN, SGI and DEC. At the time I was working for BP Research and remember the delight of the chemical engineers when they started to develop graphical applications to run on SGI workstations. Given the status SGI had at the time it’s hard to believe that the company is no more.
Hmm, I would have thought that Sun, or even Stratus Technologies would have thought of acquiring them, for what it’s worth. Although I don’t know what redeeming qualities they have, these days (other than their brand, a legacy, and a few HPC products)…
Uh…Sun and Stratus aren’t in any position to be acquiring anybody. Don’t know if you’ve been watching the news lately…
I would have thought that Sun, or even Stratus Technologies would have thought of acquiring them, for what it’s worth
I always wanted an SGI workstation so I picked up last year on eBay for $200.
It’s a nice little unix (irix) box).
Of course their campus lives on…
End of an era. A touch sad, actually. I started my first company in 1995 with $75k in SGI equipment. Btw, Om – my understanding is that they are walking away from most of the ~$500M+ in debt.
looks like ….. even good thing had to come to a stop. It hurts to see something with such great product soon gets lost in the dust.
Umm. Did someone check if the peanuts were not tainted. A lot of that going around.
I think this is a classic management failure. I wrote an obituary for it at: http://subbaiyer.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/sad-about-silicon-graphics/.
But the lessons that Silicon Graphics can teach us was written almost 2 years ago at: http://subbaiyer.wordpress.com/2007/03/12/lessons-from-sgi/