Message from John M. Zulauf on Nov 6 1997 6:58PM EST
>First my belief (and I'm sure Justin's) is that any NT product SGI >builds will be of the best quality, rich technology, and excellent >performance for the market space it's in. It may be that we are >unhappy with the quality of the operating system from Microsoft
>(it may be), but that is the user's choice, the user's voice, and
>the user's perogative.
As a SGI and Cray user, I would love to be able to afford a SGI workstation for home. I'm sure the SGI NT machine will be excellent but I don't want NT, I want Irix. Will SGI provide Irix boxes at the same price as the NT boxes? Or will the entry-level Irix box be a $17000 Octane? If that happens how will SGI maintain sufficient Irix volumes to attract the software developers?
Will SGI support other OS'es (eg SCO, Solaris, Linux) on their Intel box? If the answer is yes, that will be a support nightmare for SGI.
The best solution to this IMO is to have a common box that can either be configured as Irix/MIPS or NT/Intel. CPU, cache, OS/CPU specific BIOS stuff on a daughtercard, ALL other components identical.
Pricing would be modular ie box/memory/disk/graphics + CPU card + OS
One fear I do have is that SGI would charge a fortune for Irix.
It would be much better if they charged exactly what MS charges for NT, thus the CPU would be the only price difference.
People could then freely choose which OS they wanted. Higher end systems (Octane, Onyx2) would of course remain Irix based.
Ed |
