Sgi Quotes

Finally, Chairman Lee visited the Bertelsman Stiftung. This institution is highly appreciated in the anti-corruption area as it releases the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) and the Sustainable Governance Indicator (SGI),

I’m here this morning to announce the next generation in Nintendo home entertainment products,” Lincoln said. “A product whose improved gameplay will, simply put, be stunning. Nintendo, together with Silicon Graphics and MIPS Technologies (a subsidiary of SGI), have entered into a worldwide joint development and licensing agreement under which our companies will develop this new and unique product.

John Giannandrea: Jim Clark was very clever, because he took all of the young people that knew anything about the web—literally flew around in his jet, picking up these people—saying, “Hey, I have a job for you in California!” Aleks Totić: A week later we’re in California driving down 101. We saw Oracle, Sun, SGI, and I was like, “How come no one told me about this place before? This is awesome!” It was like the mecca. John Giannandrea: And then he paired them with seasoned people from SGI. So the first twenty or twenty-two employees were a mixture of people right out of school who knew the leading-edge thing on what was going on with the web, and then also these seasoned engineers. The SGI DNA was there. And that was the magic that kind of worked. Jim Clark: I did not have a financial plan, and there was no way I was going to take the time to write a financial plan. I was running on instinct about what the network effect could be. I thought, If we can get a couple million people using our product pretty quickly, there is going to be money to be made. The leap of faith that large numbers of people using your product is going to yield a profit does not seem to me like rocket science, but it did then. Aleks Totić: We didn’t know how to make money. Our moneymaking vision was not as strong as our engineering vision.

McCracken’s “grow by 50 percent” is classic bad strategy. It is the kind of nonsense that passes for strategy in too many companies. First, he was setting a goal, not designing a way to deal with his company’s challenge. Second, growth is the outcome of a successful strategy, and attempts to engineer growth are exercises in magical thinking. In this case, the growth SGI engineered was accomplished by rolling up a number of other firms whose workstation strategies had also run out of steam.

A well-executed sale process begins on day one of your ownership. The online data room provided to us when we acquired SGI was constantly updated thereafter by the company’s very astute CFO.

You have to sit down and think for a bit to realize what that means, not just for Clark but for anyone with the slightest interest in how economies and societies are nudged from one place to the next. A company dreamed up by a technical man a lot of big shots thought was slightly unhinged, with a twenty-two-year-old who didn’t want to do it in the first place, and another twenty-two-year-old assigned to sleep under his bed, did not become merely a success. It torpedoed investments of hundreds of millions by the world’s biggest corporations and putatively smartest minds—SGI, TW, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, AT&T. Thousands of people had more or less wasted billions of dollars and, whether they knew it or not, had been following his lead. Then, just as they all ran as a herd in one direction, he took off in another. And within six months he made them all look like fools. It was one of the great unintentional head fakes in the history of technology.

Jim, here’s what I’m going to do,” Kalinske said, now skimming through his Rolodex. “I think I have the name of someone who might be very interested in hearing about what SGI has to offer.” Kalinske scrolled past the beginning of the alphabet, slowing down as he approached the letter L. “Do you have a pen ready?” He kept skimming until he got to the contact information he was searching for: Lincoln, Howard.