“This is a spectacular turnaround from the initial Fahrenheit
announcement, and quite a reversal from SGI’s position of a year
ago, when it trumpeted Fahrenheit’s importance alongside the
announcement of its NT-based Visual Workstations. But the Microsoft
alliance has clearly not been to the company’s advantage, and in
announcing its ending of support for IRIX Fahrenheit and a
‘reduction’ (you can’t get much more reduced than saying don’t
hassle us, call Microsoft instead) in its overall involvement in
the project, SGI indicated that the rift between the two companies
may have been Linux-related.”
“Said SGI: “The future key OS platforms for SGI will be IRIX and
Linux and to a lesser extent, [our italics] Windows… While it
makes sense to have Fahrenheit on all of SGI’s strategic operating
systems, it makes little sense to have Fahrenheit on only IRIX and
Windows. After much deliberation, it was jointly decided that
Fahrenheit could best continue as a Windows OS-only product; thus
Microsoft will continue the Fahrenheit development process.”
“The other obvious alternative would of course have been for
Microsoft to co-operate in a Fahrenheit implementation for Linux,
so the end result is hardly surprising.“