[gebl]

SGI's biggest mistake was selling Cray Research's business division to Sun. These became Sun's E10k machines and got them a tun of business outside of the desktop workstation market. It is probably what kept Sun around so long and why Oracle wanted to buy them.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-05-18/business/1996139...

[i_am_ralpht]

SGI wouldn't have been able to manage that business as well as Sun did; at least the E10K was successful somewhere.

[bcantrill]

This is absolutely true. SGI was trying to decide between shutting down Cray BSD entirely or shunting it off to Sun -- who was really the only possible buyer (their product was based on SPARC and Solaris, even when at Cray). So SGI wasn't going to make a nickel off of that product, and as such, it remains one of the best acquisitions in the history of the industry: purchased for less than $10M (I'm not sure the exact figure was ever disclosed), that product line did $1.2B in top line in its first year at Sun -- and it's hard not to have fond memories of that year. (Speaking personally, debugging a nasty performance problem on an E10K in December of 1997 helped to directly inspire DTrace[1]; I will always remember that machine fondly, despite its many quirks.)

[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1117401

[gebl]

Right. Selling to Sun was the right thing for getting some nice hardware out there. Just saying, it gave Sun quite a competitive edge - probably bad idea from a business perspective. I was at Sun in that timeframe too, but not working on the E10ks :-)...

[agrostis]

As if it helped Sun (in the long run, I mean).