Re:Companies that had successful pivots
by the-dude on Friday December 31, 2021 @06:15AM
(#29746948)
Acorn to ARM.
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Pivot is a bittersweet description, and ARM was a new spin-off founded in 1990 alongside Apple. Acorn renamed itself to Element 14 Ltd in 1998 and sold off the assets from their home computer business. They built DSL kit for a couple of years before ending up as part of Broadcom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_14_(company)
Re:Companies that had successful pivots
by the-dude on Friday December 31, 2021 @10:12AM
(#29748703)
What is interesting too is that none of the other microcomputer manufacturers of the time tried to create their own CPU.
We have IBM + the rest of the mainframe guys and Sun.
Not that it helped Acorn survive, of course! Right up until the end, RISC OS ran on interrupts, too much delicate kernel code, cooperative multitasking, and unprotected memory.
They weren't the only CPU pioneers; Argonaut didn't think it unreasonable to create a custom CPU to push polygons on a Nintendo cartridge - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX
Re:Companies that had successful pivots
by the-dude on Friday December 31, 2021 @11:04AM
(#29749266)
The Super_FX seems to be a coprocessor. More companies created silicon ( Commodore? ), but not CPUs AFAIK.
It was a whole new RISC CPU. Lots of co-processors are whole CPUs. Argonaut spun a company off, and it's still shipping - the inventor said it outsold ARM and MIPS before the PS1 (from https://web.archive.org/web/20071217092221/http://www.armcha... )
Didn't Element 14 manufacture Raspberry Pis at some point?
We can add this to the debate above about whether Netflix was really a pivot. Acorn made computers and eventually decided they needed their own processor. I'm sure one could debate whether that was evolution or revolution, but what we know for sure is that Acorn is not around today and ARM (the spin-off) is.