alt Hacker News> sells products for a minimum of £10K to a company that sells products for £2K
Well .. Apple ended up doing it. Why couldn't SGI? /s
Oh, I know why SGI couldn't do it: elitism. They were high on their own hubris for the latter part of the 90's when they should have been humbled by 3DS Max and Animation:Master eating their lunch .. and used that humility to build products that made people Think Different™ .. they already had a market doing just that, thinking differently to everyone else (who were bleating "Unix is dying, its gonna die, let it die!" at a fever pitch), but that market thought quite a bit too highly of themselves, methinks .. (I know, I was there, and I was one of them.. apart from the "Unix is dying" bit, I never once thought that since the day I had a MIPS RISC/os-based Magnum pizzabox plopped on my desk and was told to do something productive with it..)
Apple literally did that with MacOSX: Unix systems' geekdom from the A/V-media-writers' Mac UI background. You attracted both kinds of white collar jobs from college background. As it came with Xquartz, you could run old legacy software for GL at highers speeds... and hire a graphics expert inbetween to do fancy PDF's/images for the articles and the press releases.
GNU/Linux with KDE3 could have been close but sadly it was too fragmented. If not, well... imagine a full libre QT from the beginning, GTK no existing (no reason for GTK+/Gnome as KDE would have been good enough), automagic Motif converting code into QT at blazing speeds, and QT themselves releasing high quality C bindings. It could have been unstoppable, even more than Apple. No ESD vs ArtsD, Pipewire merging Pulse/ESD and the like would happened long ago. Kparts would left DBUS and COM/OLE in the dust. KHTML/Webkit would have been even far more powerful.
Fedora woudn´t be the reference distro, maybe Slackware with dependencies handled with Slapt-get and a nice GUI installer for newbies. A whole different world, where the smartphones would provice both an input interface... and a sliding keyboard.