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

To: Edward Smyth who wrote (4864)	5/14/1998 12:25:00 PM
From: Patrick Gainer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14451

SGI bought Cray because the SGI senior execs were seduced by the "sexiness" of high end scientific computing. As a business decision, it was a stupid one. Cray was part of a market which was not growing. The scientific market as a whole is but a mote in the eye of commercial computing. Cray itself was shrinking, being beaten in part by SGI and the trend towards "killer micros". The SGI execs used as part of their justification, the assertion that "if we hadn't bought Cray then Sun would have". Can you imagine anything more assinine? Sun has always been focussed on commercial computing because that was where the real money was. SGI had guys like McCracken saying things like "we don't want to sell our stuff to banks or insurance companies. Banks and insurance companies are boring!" McCracken did and said things which, for a CEO, should be criminal. He was that out of it. To make matters worse, Cray's technology was not generally transferable to the commercial arena. Even the "Craylink" architecture used as the interconnect on the Origin 2000 systems had nothing, zilch, zero, to do with Cray. All the Origin technology was done at SGI and the name was chosen to cash in on the value of the Cray name. SGI should divest itself of Cray as quickly as it can. Pat

To: Edward Smyth who wrote (4864)	5/14/1998 10:22:00 PM
From: Greg Jung	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14451

Cray is all that is left of supercomputing in the US, and it is the ONE source of revenue that SGI can count on. Vector processors and massively parrallel computing are all basically gone, probably because Cray had a lock on the legacy apps and were so strong in processor development. Cray has helped SGI by forcing its presence in the visualization field. These are foolish posts to suggest it is somehow a burden, and that SGI would be so much greater without Cray. SGI is very lucky to have it. Greg