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Technology Stocks : Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Klaus B. Biggers who wrote (3475)	11/6/1997 10:33:00 PM
From: Mike Mackovitch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14451

Before I get put down as an "NT basher" again, let me just state a few things: Re: SGI worship I don't worship SGI. I am an engineer there, and as such I probably see a lot more of the crappy side of SGI than I'd like to. The only reason I watch/post to this thread is to counteract any SGI bashing that should occur (and annoy me enough at the time ;-) Re: denouncing MS My post was not meant to simply denounce MS... it was meant to point out that MS is a lot better at marketing anything than at engineering it. Your original post said that MS's loads of cash created an OS good enough to give SGI a run for its money. Which I (IMHO) happen to disagree with. Re: NT vs 4D20 It's nice to see that your NT machine stays up longer than your 4D20 but how does your NT box compare to any current SGI machine. Does your "RE3" crash more than your NT box? Re: why could NT all of a sudden be good enough for SGI now? It's possible that SGI doesn't necessarily think that NT is better now... but that it thinks that it will be better in the future - and possibly that SGI might be able to help improve the quality. (all speculation on my part) Re: how much I know about NT I'm no NT expert. unwilling to learn? I don't think so. I know what it takes to get SGI's systems to be as good as they are (particularly on the high end), and I know that NT doesn't have the ability to support what we do. If there's a chance that NT could, I'd start working with NT. Why? Heck, it might mean that I could finally afford one of our cool/kick-ass (IMO) machines some day. Re: feeling warm and fuzzy about buying NT from SGI. I'm not going make any claims about what an SGI NT product might look like or how it would perform. As to whether someone gets warm fuzzies about it, I'd say look at the machine when it comes out and compare it to others... if you don't like it, don't buy it. Lastly, let me just reiterate that I'm not here to worship SGI and bash anything else. I'm just here to try to counteract any SGI bashing/misinformation that some people on this thread seem to love to do. --MikeM

To: Klaus B. Biggers who wrote (3475)	11/7/1997 6:23:00 AM
From: Alexis Cousein	Respond to of 14451

>but, don't you feel that some customer confusion will arise since >what the customer has heard in the past from SGI sales is how bad NT >is, how it will never work, and MS is an unethical monopoly? Now >suddenly, they expect the customer to shift and believe that NT will >work, a) There are two different 'the customers' in that phrase, and you keep equating them, though we keep telling you they aren't the same. There will be overlap: there are applications where you don't give a jot about the OS, as long as it manages memory, opens files, and lets you draw things -- in OpenGL, of course. But there will also be 'the customer (1)' who will keep buying IRIX/MIPS machines because they're better for him (e.g., notably because he likes floating point performance, or wants an excellent scheduler, or large memories, or whatever); as there will also be new 'the customer (2)' people who buy NT machines now and will switch to SGI once SGI has an NT product, because it'll be better than the other NT products for him. How many different ways do we have to see 'the NT product is going to be an addition to the existing product line' spelled? > NT maybe isn't so bad after all. It keeps getting better, but your mileage may vary. There's not a hair on my head (there are some left ;) ) that would think about running a web server on NT now, not even on a small Intel box; and I wouldn't like to run anything like a CAE finite element package that does lots of I/Os on NT either. May change in the future, but we'll have to see, won't we? I'm sure the products SGI targets at the NT marketplace will be selected to fall into the space NT is at least decent in. >You've got to admit that an employee stating that NT crashes every >other time he uses it Are you sure that was an SGI employee? >Yet somehow we are supposed to feel warm and fuzzy buying an NT >product from them Stop pretending we're all borgs and part of an SGI monolithical conscience. I'm pretty sure that some IRIX engineers will think NT suck, and that some will probably not be less NT-savvy than others, but that doesn't mean the people working on NT don't know NT. In fact, there are some NT components that some SGI people know more about than anyone else in the world. anyway, all the SGI employees on this forum represent themselves. You may think some of them have poor judgment on some areas, but unless that area falls under their jurisdiction, I wouldn't worry about that, unless you can point me to a computer manufacturer that has turned all employees into god-like creatures knowledgeable about Everything (if you know one, tell me ;) ).