SGI could have done the smart thing in 1993 and targeted consumers/small business. In 1993 they released the indy which was a low end workstation. It had everything your imac has today, video camera, chat file sharing, etc. Indigo magic was pretty usable even for today. All the desktop was vector based (vector icons, etc).
In effect, they had everything OSX has today. But instead they focused on the high end niche market and got eaten from below.
Do I think this is a good move for nokia? History sides very much with NO! Which is a shame, nokia always made good hardware, but perhaps far too much of it with too little support.
RAM prices were the major reason that SGI couldn't make IRIX run decently on a machine targeted at consumers or small businesses.
In 1993, 32mb of RAM was damn expensive (I know because I had a 32mb 486/66 machine in 1993. The thing cost $10,000!) And there were delays in IRIX releases because the cheapest Indy configuration didn't have enough RAM.
In fact, RAM prices were also a major factor in Windows NT not going mainstream until about 2000. People just couldn't afford machines that would run modern operating systems well until around 1995, and it took a few more years to sort out the software issues (drivers, backward compatibility with existing software) surrounding the compromises people used until then.
I remember when windows 95 came out, all everyone talked about was affording more ram. Even the normal people. Still
with a little bit of effort they could have made it usable in 8-12meg. I think.
Then they had a second chance at the market with the SGI O2. Can you imagine walking into a best buy and seeing that next to windows95? Built in webcam, video recording, etc. It ran fine on 32-64 megs ram which in '96 was the norm.
I should mention, that NeXT also had the technology to make things happen. And they made it happen, a few years later....
Sure, IRIX could run in 8-12 mb if you turn off X. But that means no graphics and no browser. I don't mean to be rude, but have you ever actually used an SGI?
"At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first OS for the Indy, was the Windows NT 4.0 of Unices, magically able to, performance-wise, transform an R4000PC Indy with 16MB of RAM (the standard configuration) into a 386SX with a weird blue box.
SGI realized this and quickly upped the box to 32MB, at considerable cost. (As you may recall, 16MB of parity 70ns RAM was hardly cheap in 1993-1995.) Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage."
But not enough improvements in time to beat back the PC, of course.
"The Indy packs a decent amount of power into a very small (16"x14"x3"), simple, and elegant package. The chassis is just three parts: The "tray," which is sheet metal; the power supply; and the skin, which is a one-piece plastic cover with a thin sheet of metal covering the bottom of it to meet FCC compliance. The steel tray occupies the entire depth of the Indy, but not the entire width; four inches or so of the left side belong to the power supply, which occupies the entire depth of the tray and is a separate box. The whole unit is, although well-built, very economical and, dare I say, cheap. Speaking as someone who has had an opened-up broken Indy sitting on his basement floor, this is not a machine that screams "I cost $10,000." It's obvious SGI made a darn nice profit off these buggers."
A good chunk of my career was based on SGI's until 2002ish.
I started on an iris professional if that helps. I still smile when I think of SGI's c++ compiler - it had real error messages unlike gcc up until a few years ago.
SGi hardware was priced high for two reasons 1) The market (government, industry) would bear the price and 2) small market size. Fix market size and the price can come down - leaving your indigo/indigo2/crimsons' for the govt/oil/entreatment industry.
With proper application of brain juice, switching to IDE drives, etc you could have shaved and optimized enough to get an indy or O2 usable for the mass market. Add back the memory intensive things as time goes on.
Then add in some small business file/email/etc server (challenge s) and you're ready to take on the business market.
At work in roughly 1990 I had a maxed-out Sun 4/330 with 96MB of RAM - that was quite an expensive box for one user. Someone actually flew up from London to Edinburgh to install the RAM. :-)
In effect, they had everything OSX has today. But instead they focused on the high end niche market and got eaten from below.
Do I think this is a good move for nokia? History sides very much with NO! Which is a shame, nokia always made good hardware, but perhaps far too much of it with too little support.