My main problem with Silicon Graphics (& have the same problem with Sun Microsystems) is that they just tried to do too much in propriety hardware and completely resisted standards. Microsoft & IBM "won" because they made computers with actual upgrade paths and operating systems with wide support among upgrade paths. With SGI/Sun you were very much completely locked in to their hardware/software ecosystem and completely at the mercy of their pricing.
In this case, I think the market "chose right" - and the reason that the cheaper options won is because they were just better for the customer, better upgradability, better compatibility, and better competition among companies inside the ecosystems.
One of the most egregious things I point to when discussing SGI/Sun is how they were both so incredibly resistant to something as simple as the ATX/EATX standard for motherboard form factors. They just had to push their own form factors (which could vary widely from product to product) and allowed almost zero interoperability. This is just one small example but the attitude permeated both companies to the extent that it basically killed them.
The big exception here is that SGI took IrisGL and made it into OpenGL which as a standard lasted far longer than SGI. And OpenGL played a critical role preventing MSFT from taking over the 3D graphics market with Direct3D.
When I say "hardware graphics market" I'm referring to high performance graphics workstations, not gaming. There is a whole multibillion dollar market there (probably much smaller than games, but still quite significant). It's unclear what carmack's influence on the high performance graphics workstation environment is, because mini-GL left out all the details that mattered to high performance graphics (line rendering would be a good example).
In my opinion, Mesa played a more significant role because it first allowed people to port OpenGL software to run on software-only cheap systems running Linux, and later provided the framework for full OpenGL implementations coupled with hardware acceleration.
Of course, I still greatly enjoyed running Quake on Windows on my 3dfx card with OpenGL.
Well, put that way it is a market that runs on Windows with OpenGL/DirectX nowadays, or if using GNU/Linux, it is mostly with NVIDIA's proprietary drivers, specially when considering VFX reference platform.
> With SGI/Sun you were very much completely locked in to their hardware/software ecosystem and completely at the mercy of their pricing.
How is that in anyway different from Apple today with it's ARM SoCs, soldered SSDs and an OS that requires "entitlements" from Apple to "unlock" features and develop on?
You can buy a cheap Mac and easily write programs for it. You don't have to spend $40k on a computer, you don't have to buy a support contract, you don't have to buy developer tools.
Every time I’ve checked over the last decade (including today), you can buy a mac mini that supports the latest macOS for under $250 on ebay. You can also test your app using github actions for free if your use case fits in the free tier.
There is no way to do this for an IBM z16, which is the kind of vendor lock in that people are saying Apple doesn’t have.
In this case, I think the market "chose right" - and the reason that the cheaper options won is because they were just better for the customer, better upgradability, better compatibility, and better competition among companies inside the ecosystems.
One of the most egregious things I point to when discussing SGI/Sun is how they were both so incredibly resistant to something as simple as the ATX/EATX standard for motherboard form factors. They just had to push their own form factors (which could vary widely from product to product) and allowed almost zero interoperability. This is just one small example but the attitude permeated both companies to the extent that it basically killed them.