It was clear they were trying to do more consumer grade things, just look at the N64. Couldn't get more mainstream than that. Seeing how the graphics market ended up, it looks obvious from here but in the mid 90's it was still the wild west and everybody was throwing mud at the wall seeing what would stick.
I have never really said that they where "taken by surprise", but a part of it felt like (from the outside) that management had been a little blinded by their pass success and the profit margins from their workstations combined with no clear path forwards for the whole industry. Nvidia could have very easily been just a curiosity of the past but they managed to strike it lucky standing on the shoulders of others.
If SGI had always been a company that could provide graphics workstations the worked with x86/Windows PC's early for example - maybe they would have fared better. Would have gone with the flow of technology at the time rather than fighting uphill no matter the potential technical brilliance. But being saddled to their MIPS processors and custom OS meant that once people left, they almost never came back. One can have the best tech and still fail.
> It was clear they were trying to do more consumer grade things, just look at the N64.
Yes, but the team that did that also left SGI, then worked directly with Nintendo for the GameCube and are acquired by ATI. I’m not sure how SGI managed to not support that effort within itself.
Nintendo wasn't loyal to the company it was loyal to the team, so when they just decided to leave and form ArtX they took the customer with them... SGI was happy with the Nintendo contract. They earned $1 in additional royalties for every single N64 cartridge sold worldwide. Losing the team was a big blow.
> provide graphics workstations the worked with x86/Windows PC's
Integraph started making PCs with high-end graphics at one point, when they abandoned CLIX and gave up on their (Fairchild's, really) Clipper processor. It didn't work for them either. SGI did their own "Visual Workstation" that ran Windows and had a Pentium, but that too was a huge disappointment.
The 320 and 540 had a few nice things going for them: You could option them with the same 1600SW monitor that the higher-end O2 workstations used without having to use the fiddly multilink. SGI paid Microsoft for a HAL license and did a better job with multiprocessor than what you got from installing the vanilla version.
They had decent bandwidth internally allowing them to playback uncompressed realtime standard definition video which normal PCs running Windows couldn’t do at the time.
The moment your product runs Windows, it'll compete with thousands of others. Being able to do one single thing better than the others won't help you much unless that one single thing can drive all your sales.
Even for video rendering, if your box is twice as fast, it'll be outcompeted by machines that cost half as much or less. At times my desktop PC was not fast enough, it was simpler to get another PC and run time-consuming things on it while I did other things on the other.
I have never really said that they where "taken by surprise", but a part of it felt like (from the outside) that management had been a little blinded by their pass success and the profit margins from their workstations combined with no clear path forwards for the whole industry. Nvidia could have very easily been just a curiosity of the past but they managed to strike it lucky standing on the shoulders of others.
If SGI had always been a company that could provide graphics workstations the worked with x86/Windows PC's early for example - maybe they would have fared better. Would have gone with the flow of technology at the time rather than fighting uphill no matter the potential technical brilliance. But being saddled to their MIPS processors and custom OS meant that once people left, they almost never came back. One can have the best tech and still fail.