Silicon Graphics was the quintessential Valley brand. Founded in 1982 by the quintessential Valley guy, serial entrepreneur Jim Clark who would go on to start Netscape. Ten years later, SGI was a tech brand of purest gold. Ditto Netscape for a brief shining moment shortly thereafter.
Remember? Silicon Graphics was at a dizzying peak right about the time that Bill Clinton arrived at the White House. Today comes the news that a bankrupt SGI was sold to somebody called Rackable Systems for an amount comparable to Clinton’s yearly income from speaking gigs. The TechCrunch item sums it up pretty well in describing how SGI succumbed “to the spread of cheap Linux boxes hooked up with massive redundancies. You don’t build Web-scale services on expensive proprietary boxes. You build them on cheap, open-source systems. Just ask Google (or Amazon or Salesforce or anyone else.” Indeed.
Ironic how a company that brought dinosaurs to life in the movie Jurassic Park would end up a dinosaur. But that’s life in Silicon Valley. Today's hot-shot, tomorrow's T-Rex.
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