You can thank "Rocket Rick" Belluzzo for that. After Ed McCracken was fired as Silicon Graphics' CEO, Belluzzo was supposed to revive the company which was on somewhat of a slump. His solutions included dumping one of the best company logos...the SGI cube, changing its trade name to its acronym, SGI, spinning off the embedded MIPS division, and what brings the subject of this node, an attempt to make SGI a Microsoft company with Windows NT workstations.

To bring SGI out of the slump it was in, Belluzzo thought that SGI should make NT workstations or "Visual Workstations" as they were dubbed. Now although they were very fine computers, why would someone buy a $20,000 SGI when they could get a much cheaper and similar Dell NT system. That's what happened, and the Visual Workstations were a complete failure. Many thought this was Belluzzo's attempt to suck-up to Microsoft, "Hey! I've destroyed one of your rivals, now give me a good job!" Indeed, when he resigned 1 year later (Term: September 1998-September 1999) he became Microsoft's chief operating officer, it seemed that was quite accurate. Interestingly, as part of a corporate restructuring, Belluzzo will be stepping down in September of this year. SGI is still recovering from the stupidity of Belluzzo's actions.

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