Re: SGI,...
SGIs purchase of Cray was one of a long list of their mistakes that helped lead to their ultimate demise. The problem wasn't that they bought Cray, it was that they moved all Cray staff onto their own T&Cs (so most Cray staff received massive pay-rises - thus greatly impacting margin from SGI's new Cray division) and applied all the perks allowing time of service to mean you could get additional holidays - with no cap, so some senior Cray staff were eligible for many months of paid vacation per year. Flogging a Cray project that used SPARC to Sun for a bargain-basement price also didn't help as it gave Sun a very capable line of servers with which to compete with SGI.
Then SGI, continued to keep Cray rather separated from the rest of the company. It's almost as if they were planning on selling Cray almost as soon as they'd bought them. If I recall, the only real long-term benefit to the Cray purchase for SGI was the development of NUMALink for high-speed linking of compute nodes. In the end, Cray was flogged by SGI after a few years (again for peanuts) and promptly outlived SGI by quite some time. SGI as a company was effectively dead back in 2009. The one that was bought by HPE a few years ago was actually the former Rackable Systems who bought SGIs assets and renamed themselves SGI following this.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
