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.
[1] http://www.homestyler.com/