They sort of tried. Around then they had a Windows NT machine that cost around US$12,000. But it was too late. The first serious graphics cards for PCs were appearing, from Matrox and others, with prices of a few thousand dollars.
(I tried some early NT graphics cards on a Pentium Pro machine. This was before gamer GPUs; these were pro cards from tiny operations. Fujitsu tried unsuccessfully to get into that business, with a small business unit in Silicon Valley. At one point they loaned me a Fujitsu Sapphire graphics card prototype. When I went back to their office to return it, the office had closed.)
Also, there was a bad real estate deal. SGI owned a lot of land where Google HQ is now. They sold it to Goldman Sachs in a sale and lease-back transaction, selling at the bottom of the market. That land, the area north of US 101 in Mountain View had, and has, a special property tax break. It's the "Shoreline Regional Park Community", set up in 1969. The area used to be a dump. Those hills near Google HQ are piles of trash. So there was a tax deal to get companies to locate there. That made the land especially valuable.
SGI tried its hand at the PC video card business as early as 1990. I was at Autodesk at the time and got one of these to beta test on a DOS 486 running AutoCAD. It was an impressive product. But huge; it took up two full-length ISA slots. And the display drivers were a bit buggy.
I doubt that would have helped. Customers didn't love Irix as an OS. They tolerated it in order to use SGI's superior hardware and specialized applications.
Competitors such as Sun did port their proprietary Unix flavors to the x86 PC platform but never achieved traction. It was impossible to compete with free Linux, and lack of device drivers was always an obstacle.
Kind of. Oxide uses what's left of OpenSolaris as their OS of choice and Oracle still sells Solaris SPARC servers. It's the retreat up - they can defend their hill for a long time that way and, in Oracle's case, they don't even innovate the same way IBM does with POWER and Z.
(I tried some early NT graphics cards on a Pentium Pro machine. This was before gamer GPUs; these were pro cards from tiny operations. Fujitsu tried unsuccessfully to get into that business, with a small business unit in Silicon Valley. At one point they loaned me a Fujitsu Sapphire graphics card prototype. When I went back to their office to return it, the office had closed.)
Also, there was a bad real estate deal. SGI owned a lot of land where Google HQ is now. They sold it to Goldman Sachs in a sale and lease-back transaction, selling at the bottom of the market. That land, the area north of US 101 in Mountain View had, and has, a special property tax break. It's the "Shoreline Regional Park Community", set up in 1969. The area used to be a dump. Those hills near Google HQ are piles of trash. So there was a tax deal to get companies to locate there. That made the land especially valuable.