> I am curious what the world would be like now if Silicon Graphics had made a model that was less than $2,000, but still ran Irix and had some amount of the 3D processing stuff with it.
I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference as the low end of the market was driven by gaming and multimedia (i.e. movies on PC screen), and the high end of the graphics market was driven by rendering for expensive video and film production. In short, what you needed to play Fallout (1997 release) at home was an order of magnitude less than you needed to render CGI for Men in Black (1997 release).
> if they had released something in 1997 for "prosumers", before OS X came out, would Apple have its same market position now
I believe Apple would have been just as successful as they are today. Software availability (e.g. Adobe and Microsoft Office) and ease of use were very good on Mac, and not so good on workstations like SGI. There was a very small, very demanding market for SGI's workstations (rendering super high quality graphics), and there was a huge market for what Apple supplied (business, print, web graphics, music production, video production). In short the software ecosystem wouldn't have happened. Apple did a great job when OSX came out of making it easy-ish for app developers to port to OSX and allowed users to run their old mac software on their new OSX powered mac.
> Would we all be using SGiPhones?
Probably not. System V unix was very expensive to license (hence Android being Linux based and iOS being based on BSD and Mach) and would have added considerable cost to each mobile device based on licensing at the time. A lot of what made it possible to package up a modern smartphone was open source software + low cost components with ridiculous capability (for their cost). None of this was of interest to SGI where they were focused on high-end equipment with little commodity appeal.
I agree with the software availability, but I'll just note that Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator were ported from classic macos to Irix with a Unix porting toolkit. Adobe Framemaker was also available.
Like a lot of people here, I learned to program on a 99/4A before moving to a PC. The 99/4A was actually great, but looking back very primitive. TI-Basic -> Extended Basic -> Assembly. When I got to the PC, I missed hardware sprites and a real sound chip (a sound card for a PC cost $300 at the time - about $100 more than my TI cost my Dad!).
It always amazed me that the 99/4A had such a vibrant community (that is still creating hardware and software around the machine) and so many outlandish ways to expand the machine.
> And many fail to discern between "disparage" and "critique" or even "Question in order to learn"
I think I’ve had the conversation with new to my organization devs a few hundred times: “Look... saying code is crap or stupid is telling others you’ve given up on learning. How about asking why it is the way it is?”
> greatest failings I've seen in leadership in our time is the idea that in order to make a critique one must come with a solution in hand.
The pattern works at very high levels in an org chart, but with developers and those that manage them it breaks the whole concept of problem solving. You have to be able to identify and understand problems before you can come up with a solution... and usually, with software, the solution is developer hours.
This is 100% true. Those problems you are solving probably don’t look all that important, but, in reality, they have been blocking sales, renewals, account expansions, or even access to markets for a long time. The business side of the house has probably given up or occasionally tries to wag the dog to get it fixed.
> Haven’t you also often made a moat between yourself and doing literally anything else more interesting at the company
Nope, assuming that code works and handles UTF8 (sorry, but there is a point where it is too far gone to save). You’ve made yourself essential. You know the business better. You are strategic. And often, you become the one person who knows the legacy code base. And you will quickly find yourself a part of super important decisions. You’ll be called out regularly for fixing things that have gone unfixed for years. You’ll also drive value by helping the company avoid spending vast amounts of money re-implementing functioning code. On top of that, new product is often a mix of new and old, so you’ll quickly find yourself in the middle of new product teams.
These insights are essential for playing the long game; it may sound distasteful for people early in their careers. That’s fine, but when you’re running out the clock to retirement, can’t go wrong.
I'd rather pay the taxes directly than trust someone else to do it, especially when that someone is making it as difficult to get the money from your investment. Those RSU's were earned, and the whole point is you get to share in the liquidity event.
Huh? Who's trusting some other party to pay your taxes? I'm saying keep the RSUs, pay for the taxes out of pocket, so you hold onto RSUs that may appreciate faster than, say, holding onto SP500, likes say picking up FB at 30.
1. Free competition and lots of it.
2. No widely adopted standard for micropayment
3. Transaction processing fees often left very little for the site.