It's almost like when SGI bankrupted (metaphorically) overnight when PCs came to market. Our CGI progenitors used 80k machines to render bunch of polygons...we are using 6k+ workstations...
SGI's didn't go bankrupt specifically because PC's came on to the market, Windows NT was around for a while, and nothing really changed. But then one day with a well thought out plan by Microsoft, they bought Softimage to specifically port it to Windows NT, with the hopes that everyone else would not want to miss out on the action, and it worked, as soon after everyone else started porting to NT. To top it all off, once Microsoft were satisfied that they had gotten enough of the new emerging CG market to sustain itself, they then sold Softimage, and even made a profit on the sale.
That's interesting and I've never even heard of Softimage in this tale :- ).
But even Wikipedia lists the main reason for decline to be hardware competition and their failed attempts at migration from MIPS/IRIS architecture to similarly expensive and soon to be obsolete Itanium.
Their main competition is listed on hardware level (Dell, HP, IBM) through that decision ( 2006 +/- ), even though software is mentioned to have played an obvious role, Maya is mentioned instead (as Alias/Wavefront).
Why would software be the defining factor if it worked on multiplatform at that point (1996) ? The cost of hardware would still be decisive factor in such situation ? (Regardless of particular software).
Now you could run Alias/Maya at 100k IRIS machine vs 10k x86 PC from Dell.
Even their final death was due to late adoption of Xeons in Super-server market where they were still competing with Itanium. They only lasted 3 years (2006-2009) between bankrupcy protection to final bankrupcy.
Seems to be like company that banked on wrong hardware decisions after their original technology became obsolete. Whatever role software played, it wasn't the primary one.
« Last Edit: 2019-07-16, 10:48:18 by Juraj Talcik »
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