In 1995, SGI bought Alias and Wavefront, each with their own animation systems. Impressively, SGI got their people to work together and produce Maya. But it was close to the end of $10,000 to $20,000 graphics workstations; around 2000, the gamer graphics cards became good enough to run the high end software.

SGI thrashed around for years trying to find a niche. They bought Cray, for supercomputers. Didn't work out. They bought Intergraph, which built expensive CAD workstations. Dead end; PCs could do that. They got into servers, but 1U commodity servers crushed them. They made a big commitment to the Itanium, Intel's attempted successor to x86. Failure on all fronts. SGI was in the expensive computing business, and expensive computing was over.

That's what worries Autodesk's Carl Bass. Autodesk was originally, in the early 1980s, the price leader in CAD. The competition was selling high-end workstations bundled with a CAD package. The original big achievement of AutoCAD was cramming large drawings into a 640K DOS PC. It was kind of clunky, but way ahead of manual drafting. An AutoCAD setup was originally about $1K of software and $3K of hardware.

Autodesk has been trying to come out with low end mass market products for years. But there are only so many design engineers and architects. Years ago they had Autodesk Kitchen Designer, for laying out cabinets to fit. Now they have Autodesk Homestyler[1], a phone/tablet app which takes a picture of your room, builds a 3D model, lets you add furniture, and provides photorealistic renderings. It's free, supported by sales from the furniture for which it has models. It's a great piece of technology that's not very successful. IKEA has a competing product, which of course only has IKEA items, and that's more successful.

[1] http://www.homestyler.com/

Interestingly, SGI seems to be doing alright with their supercomputer business, such as UV. The market certainly shrank on them, but what's leftover doesn't look like commoditized or cloud computing will be able to compete it away any time soon.

I agree they made poor acquisition choices, but not that "expensive computing [is] over" -- it's just not the consumer market people thought it would be.

To be fair, it's not the original SGI anymore. In 2009 Rackable Systems (a cheap commodity server company) bought what was left of SGI and renamed their company SGI.

So, it's not quite the same lineage.

The new SGI does seem to have some nice gear, but I don't know how much secret sauce there is. I've never used it, but it looks pretty commodity to me. (Not that there's anything wrong with that).

SGI bought Alias|Wavefront BECAUSE of Microsoft.

When Microsoft bought Softimage, SGI freaked out, they feared MS would pull something awesome and make everything switch to x86 for editing.

Then they bought Wavefront and Alias separately, and forced the two to merge, Wavefront had a cool suite of editing tools that was award winning in the movie industry, Alias had a competing suite, the suites had lots of stuff unique to them, they merged the suits and created Maya (example: some of binaries that ship with Maya came from Alias, another ones from Wavefront, the GUI if I remember correctly was designed by Alias, the scripting language and the file formats by Wavefront, and so on...)

Autodesk then just reaped the mismanagement of MS and SGI