Re: IRIX freeware releases

From: Ivan Rayner (ivanr_at_sgi.com)
Date: 11/30/03 

Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 10:41:34 +0000 (UTC)

SkyWriter <skywriter@mrnutty.com> wrote:
> Ivan Rayner wrote:
>> > but coming out with several lines of failed peecee platforms cost nothing,
>> > i guess.
>>
>> Ah, now that is an entirely different topic... All companies try things
>> and fail. The PC experience did lead to the Altix which is an impressive
>> machine. (As for the Windows PC experiment, the less said the better :)
>
> yes, well the trick NOT to try things that fail. given SGI's need for high
> profit product lines the peecee's never made sense.
> it might have lead engineering to altix, but certainly not your customers...
> or did they, never mind, i probably won't believe it.

I really don't know how many customers would go from a PC to an Altix.
It doesn't seem like a logical progression, however if a customer did
have an SGI Intel workstation and was happy with it, that would only
help our chances of selling them a high end system if they required
one.

Still, I expect we'll sell Altixes to customers that want to upgrade
their old Origins, and others that are simply impressed by its
performance. 'Course I'm just a lowly engineer, so I know nothing
about sales.

>> I have no insight into what features get "fixed" and what don't. I do
>> know that it all comes down to priorities, allocation of resources and
>> what makes SGI money... Would you have it any other way?
>
> absolutely not. but then again, i am not in the market for 15k workstations,
> and i've seen a lot of products that don't make SGI money, and a lot of
> quarters that SGI didn't make money.

I didn't say we were any good at it. :)

>> We bring plenty of new hardware to market under the 6.5 name. We add
>> plenty of new features under the 6.5 name. Renumbering 6.5.24 to IRIX
>> 7 wont automatically get you a fancy new desktop...
>
> my belief is that 'if you can see the desktop you're not working hard enough'
> so, you can bag all this GNOME KDE CDE crap. indigo magic is fine for me.

Well, the desktop was only an example. Renumbering to 7 wont get you
any feature that couldn't already be put into 6.5.x. I used the desktop
example because most people equate a new version with something flashy
and obvious on their screen.

>> Admittedly there are a bunch of little fixes we could do if we were
>> prepared to break compatibility, but they simply aren't worth it.
>
> acceptable, albiet i'll take your word for what they are.

The compatibility guarantee bites engineering all the time, and working
around it can become half the problem. It doesn't just mean binary and
API compatibility. One example is that we wanted to improve xfsdump's
error reporting, to give a more detailed indication of what caused an
error. The obvious way to fix this was change the exit status
numbering, but we couldn't do that because customers might have scripts
which rely on the existing exit status numbers. So we had to change
xfsdump to print out its status at the end, which is why xfsdump will
print SUCCESS nowadays.

If we went to IRIX 7 would we bother to change xfsdump's exit status
reporting? Of course not.

There are many less trivial examples, and many that would be changed,
but all in all, it probably isn't worth the effort, especially given
our current resources...

Ivan 

-- 
Ivan Rayner
ivanr@sgi.com

Relevant Pages

  • Re: IRIX freeware releases
    ... Do you really expect SGI to support ancient hardware into perpetuity? ... Ivan Rayner ...
    (comp.sys.sgi.admin)
  • Re: Another one bites the dust
    ... the problem, as I see it, is not really Linux. ... The problem is that SGI is screwing their Irix customers in ... It's a hell of a lot harder to get new customers than it ... Yeah yeah yeah, SGI is a real company, unlike ...
    (comp.sys.sgi.misc)
  • Re: IRIX freeware releases
    ... Ivan Rayner wrote: ... > Do you really expect SGI to support ancient hardware into perpetuity? ... however not upgrading opengl is a big drawback. ...
    (comp.sys.sgi.admin)
  • Re: Project Ultraviolet: No IRIX?
    ... That's the case with most SGI fans... ... And customers rarely ... You forget that computers are just tools, ...
    (comp.sys.sgi.misc)
  • Re: IRIX freeware releases
    ... >> The drive to support Linux started well before Altix was released. ... A commodity part for SGI, ... but with the same argument one could say that x86 and MIPS are the ... Ivan Rayner ...
    (comp.sys.sgi.admin)