Re:IBM On The Verge of Buying Sun for $7 billion
by gaius on Friday April 03, 2009 @06:49AM
(#544742)
What killed SGI was high-end applications (mechanical engineering, 3D graphics, oil & gas exploration, computational chemistry) being ported to NT and the Windows games industry underwriting the development of graphics cards powerful enough to rival workstations at a fraction of the price. Neither Linux nor OSX were significant factors in the downfall of SGI.
Re:IBM On The Verge of Buying Sun for $7 billion
by wheels on Friday April 03, 2009 @07:00AM
(#544753)
That's a good point, but I don't think it's the whole story, and is probably more true for SGI than Sun.
I think part of my bias in how I see things was I really only caught the tail end of Sun's heyday in the early days of web serving when a lot was being served up by Sun machines running Netscape's web server. In universities there was also a shift from Solaris to Linux, but by the time I was away from working student jobs (did admin and web app devel for the college starting in '97) those spaces were Linux dominated.
Re:IBM On The Verge of Buying Sun for $7 billion
by stcredzero on Friday April 03, 2009 @09:08AM
(#544842)
Sun might have been doing some interesting things, but they've pretty much had a decade of investing into technologies they don't have a way to monetize
To monetize, you need a combination of strategic vision and marketing. "Strategic vision and marketing" is basically Apple! (Also IBM, but in it's more conventional, stodgy way.)
Sun might have been doing some interesting things, but they've pretty much had a decade of investing into technologies they don't have a way to monetize, both in software and hardware. I'm just glad that it's IBM buying them since I think of the potential acquirers, that IBM would be the closest fit to keep some of their character intact.