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

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (4906)	5/21/1998 1:05:00 PM
From: Marcelo Magnasco	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14451

Thomas: you said Hey Marcelo, What the ^(#! you mean ?? > It's truly scary that someone from SGI does not understand this. TOM, TOM, TOM, Will you SHUTUP and LISTEN. Marcelo is agreeing with what you been saying along. Just to be clear: SGI has a well defined constituency of devoted buyers, among which I have been for almost a decade. Many in this constituency, myself included, see no wrong in SGI offering NT products; in fact it's good. What some, myself included, see as deeply wrong, is dropping UNIX. I am a scientist, I constantly have to write my own software for my own small-scale simulations, and so do the members of my group and the colleagues at my Center. IRIX has afforded us until now a way in which we can develop small scale simulations, see the inside through easy graphics, then run it on a bigger machine for the publication runs. Firefly was saying that we'd still have unix in the top end. I personally see that as deeply wrong. If I can have unix on a 40+K$ box, but I cannot buy a 5K$ box for the grad student, then the grad student will never use the 40K$ unit. There will be some amount of effort devoted to write the simu (of, say, the development of barnacled appendages in torpedo fish) on his small box. The effort required to PORT that to a bigger 40K$ machine would exceed the benefits, and therefore the 40K$ machine will go underutilized, and hence I am not going to buy the next generation of it. So, as far as I am concerned, SGI would then lose BOTH the 5K$ unix market AND the 40K$ market, all because they want to get a (yet unproven) 5K$ NT market. So, it was truly scary to me, that someone like Firefly, who works for SGI apparently, did not get this point, and insists I will still get unix on 80K$+ boxen. At a time where I can get Linux or OpenBSD running on a 600$ Toshiba Libretto 50 weighting 1.7 pounds, I see this comment as (a) dinosaurian and (b) deeply disregardful of the people who've bought their stuff for the past decade. I don't know whether I'm positive about SGI. I'm just saying what I see, and what I see is that NT does not offer to me any advantage over UNIX, while having a lot of disadvantages, and therefore a move by SGI to discontinue their small unix operations is deeply unsettling. Offer as much NT solutions as you can deliver, but don't drop IRIX on the low end!!! Go check comp.sys.sgi. for a lot of very vociferous discussions on this issue. You'll find many people voicing the same opinions. Marcelo