XSI was originally from Softimage. Softimage sold out to Microsoft, which had no idea what to do with a high-end product other than to make it run on Windows NT. That ended SGI's reign in Hollywood; between 1998 and 2001, studios moved off SGI onto PCs with lots of memory and graphics cards that rapidly got cheaper.
Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid. Avid wanted Softimage because they also had a good non-linear editor, Softimage|DS, which was a threat to Avid's business. Avid used to sell furniture; they built computers with lots of accessories for handling video into wooden desks. These were called "editing suites", and cost upwards of $100K. Softimage could do that on commodity hardware.
Avid had no idea what to do with the 3D product line. It was a product Avid was stuck with, and it had its own team in Montreal. In 2008, Avid sold that to Autodesk.
Autodesk had developed its own 3D system, 3D Studio Max, which is still around. They bought Alias/Wavefront Maya from SGI when SGI tanked in 2004. That's how Autodesk ended up owning the 3D animation business.
Big studios didn't convert to NT, they converted to Linux. SGI ended their own reign by not being able to compete with Nvidia and AMD/Intel. Even now all those studios use csh since that was the default shell that came with Irix.
SGI made a few NT computers as an attempt to sell PCs which of course didn't work out due to not offering much except for a name an inflated price. Linux was coming around at the time, but SGI wouldn't have been an early adopter of Linux by any means since Irix was one of the jewels of the company, and helping adoption of Linux would have helped people transition to commodity PCs.
NT was a part of the transition for much smaller groups or individuals since they could buy a dual processor pentium II/pro and put a decent amount of RAM in them along with an Oxygen card that would accelerate OpenGL.
Large studios had a huge amount of infrastructure built up in pipeline scripts and workflow, proprietary software that might have used POSIX APIs and GUI libraries that weren't on windows, and big network file systems that tied things together.
I was working in the industry at the time, and my feeling was that while a few big studios went with Linux the vast majority of studios (especially among the smaller studios) went with NT.
Every big studio and the majority of medium studios converted to Linux once Houdini and Maya were ported. At the time the industry was dominated by five big American studios and 3-5 big London studios, all of which went the Linux route, not the NT route. Maybe you worked on multiple small studios that jumped on windows, but that wasn't the norm nor was windows the driving force is providing a smooth path from Irix.
By buying Softimage, Microsoft wanted to develop a high end product, to demonstrate to the world that its OS was powerful enough to compete with high end, software specific machines, at a lower cost. In that regards, I believe they succeeded.
I remember Softimage XSI, that was a beautiful system and I loved working with it back when I was playing around with some 3D stuff. They used to have great deals on pricing so it was also much more affordable than a lot of the other professional systems, but still seemed to provide a lot of the same functionality.
In 1995, SGI bought Alias and Wavefront, each with their own animation systems. Impressively, SGI got their people to work together and produce Maya. But it was close to the end of $10,000 to $20,000 graphics workstations; around 2000, the gamer graphics cards became good enough to run the high end software.
SGI thrashed around for years trying to find a niche. They bought Cray, for supercomputers. Didn't work out. They bought Intergraph, which built expensive CAD workstations. Dead end; PCs could do that. They got into servers, but 1U commodity servers crushed them. They made a big commitment to the Itanium, Intel's attempted successor to x86. Failure on all fronts. SGI was in the expensive computing business, and expensive computing was over.
That's what worries Autodesk's Carl Bass. Autodesk was originally, in the early 1980s, the price leader in CAD. The competition was selling high-end workstations bundled with a CAD package. The original big achievement of AutoCAD was cramming large drawings into a 640K DOS PC. It was kind of clunky, but way ahead of manual drafting. An AutoCAD setup was originally about $1K of software and $3K of hardware.
Autodesk has been trying to come out with low end mass market products for years. But there are only so many design engineers and architects. Years ago they had Autodesk Kitchen Designer, for laying out cabinets to fit. Now they have Autodesk Homestyler[1], a phone/tablet app which takes a picture of your room, builds a 3D model, lets you add furniture, and provides photorealistic renderings. It's free, supported by sales from the furniture for which it has models. It's a great piece of technology that's not very successful. IKEA has a competing product, which of course only has IKEA items, and that's more successful.
Interestingly, SGI seems to be doing alright with their supercomputer business, such as UV. The market certainly shrank on them, but what's leftover doesn't look like commoditized or cloud computing will be able to compete it away any time soon.
I agree they made poor acquisition choices, but not that "expensive computing [is] over" -- it's just not the consumer market people thought it would be.
To be fair, it's not the original SGI anymore. In 2009 Rackable Systems (a cheap commodity server company) bought what was left of SGI and renamed their company SGI.
So, it's not quite the same lineage.
The new SGI does seem to have some nice gear, but I don't know how much secret sauce there is. I've never used it, but it looks pretty commodity to me. (Not that there's anything wrong with that).
When Microsoft bought Softimage, SGI freaked out, they feared MS would pull something awesome and make everything switch to x86 for editing.
Then they bought Wavefront and Alias separately, and forced the two to merge, Wavefront had a cool suite of editing tools that was award winning in the movie industry, Alias had a competing suite, the suites had lots of stuff unique to them, they merged the suits and created Maya (example: some of binaries that ship with Maya came from Alias, another ones from Wavefront, the GUI if I remember correctly was designed by Alias, the scripting language and the file formats by Wavefront, and so on...)
Autodesk then just reaped the mismanagement of MS and SGI
Just wanted to point out that 3ds max used to be named "3D Studio MAX" and grew out of an even older DOS software called 3D Studio. Autodesk bought it somewhere around when it got ported to Windows NT (maybe 1997?).
Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid. Avid wanted Softimage because they also had a good non-linear editor, Softimage|DS, which was a threat to Avid's business. Avid used to sell furniture; they built computers with lots of accessories for handling video into wooden desks. These were called "editing suites", and cost upwards of $100K. Softimage could do that on commodity hardware.
Avid had no idea what to do with the 3D product line. It was a product Avid was stuck with, and it had its own team in Montreal. In 2008, Avid sold that to Autodesk.
Autodesk had developed its own 3D system, 3D Studio Max, which is still around. They bought Alias/Wavefront Maya from SGI when SGI tanked in 2004. That's how Autodesk ended up owning the 3D animation business.