Re:Why HP Fell
by acdha on Monday August 20, 2018 @11:40AM
(#17800830)
The interesting thing is that a single executive had a large share in killing both HP and SGI as major players. Richard Belluzzo was the guy who decided that HP should switch from HP UX on PA-RISC to Windows NT on Itanium, and then moved to SGI to preside over the decision to turn SGI into a Windows reseller and gave the SGI 3D graphics team — which at the time had a legendary reputation — to nVidia along with their patent portfolio.
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Yep, I've studied this in great detail as I was very personally affected by it: it's always the same people who were the root cause of this. Sun Microsystems was the only company which stuck to its guns and continued with UNIX, sometimes in direct competition with the Microsoft corporation, because the engineers fought for their life's work like crazy, ultimately resulting in illumos today, so it lives on.
Scott McNealy, bless his heart, was the only executive openly willing to testify in the case against Microsoft versus NetScape: none of these other "executives" had the balls to testify for fear of making Bill Gates angry.
It was always the same set of people hopping companies, selling their bullshit and ruining them. Now we have an inferior operating system on inferior hardware, total chaos in virtualisation and cloud, low salaries and bad working conditions, in good part thanks to them ruining these UNIX companies.
Re:Why HP Fell
by johnvanommen on Monday August 20, 2018 @12:44PM
(#17801456)
WOW. I did not know this. And now NVidia is far more than a "gaming" company.
Yeah, there's a really interesting alternative history of computing where SGI's management was anywhere near the same caliber as their engineering.
SGI engineers designed and implemented mind-blowing stuff: inst(1M) software management subsystem is still lightyears ahead of any other, even today, and how long has IRIX been out of production?
Unbelievably mind blowing engineers.