On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 03:50:56PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
In retrospect maybe DEC and SGI should have merged and then partnered with AMD (as you note above some of DEC's processor design team indeed ended up at AMD on the Opteron project), but I think it would have taken a crapload of foresight and/or faith to do that.
Yeah, the biggest thing they lacked was faith in their own products. I remember being in meetings with SGI folks explaining how the future was going to be windows on ia64, and immediately wondering who our new supplier would be. The argument was always financial, but in reality the problem was misallocation of resources, not lack of resources. (I guess after billions of dollars thrown away on failed strategies the problem does become a lack of resources, but it didn't start out that way.) They would have had to become smaller and more focused, and big companies don't shrink easily.