Silicon Graphics, Inc.

In January of 1987, Ed McCracken, President and CEO of Silicon Graphics, contemplated the future direction of his company. One year earlier, the company had embarked upon an ambitious effort to develop a high-performance computer graphics workstation with an architecture based on a new 32-bit RISC microprocessor. McCracken was now concerned with looking ahead to Silicon Graphics’ next generation of product, and he was weighing two possible options: either the company could invest in developing an even higher performance workstation, exploiting the potential of the new RISC architecture and reasserting the company’s dominance of the high-performance market, or the company could try to develop a fully functional graphics workstation at a lower price point, in order to make graphics computing available to a much wider market.