SGI has filed for banruptcy and Rackable has bid $25M for the assets – which through the miracle of bankruptcy law can now be peeled off from the debts. SGI is partly one of the victims of the Itanium (or the “Itanic” as it was known to the cynical), but it certainly was not Intel’s fault that SGI’s management so guilelessly took the bait.
There should be a requirement that in any company, anyone who advocates a product strategy based on what other people in the industry, or standards bodies, or experts, or anyone else other than prospective customers might want, should be unceremoniously dumped. There are two important questions that off-course companies do not ask. The first is: what can we make and sell at a profitable price that customers will want? The second is: what parts of the technology are our value add and what parts are generic? These are really hard to answer, but if you instead ask things like: what do our partner companies want us to do or what is the ‘coming technology’, you will do poorly.