At the time, I was a fairly junior employee doing research in AGD, the advanced graphics division. I saw funny things, which should have led me to resign, but I didn't know better at the time. Starting in the late 90's, SGI was feeling competitive pressure from 3DFx, NVIDIA, 3DLabs, Evans and Sutherland (dying, but big), and they hadn't released a new graphics architecture in years. They were selling Infinite Reality 2's (which were just a clock increase over IR1), and some tired Impact graphics on Octanes. The O2 was long in the tooth. Internally, engineering was working on next gen graphics for both, and they were both dying of creeping featureitis. Nothing ever made a deadline, they kept slipping by months. The high end graphics pipes to replace infinite reality never shipped due to this, and the "VPro" graphics for Octane were fatally broken on a fundamental level, where fixing it would mean going back to the algorithmic drawing board, not just some Verilog tweak, basically, taping out a new chip. Why was it so broken? Because some engineers decided to implement a cool theory and were allowed to do it (no clipping, recursive rasterization, hilbert space memory organization).
At the same time, NVIDIA was shipping the GeForce, 3DFx was dying, and these consumer cards processed many times more triangles than SGI's flagship Infinite Reality 2, which was the size of a refrigerator and pulled kilowatts. SGI kept saying that anti-aliasing is the killer feature of SGI and that this is why we continue to sell into visual simulation and oil and gas sector. The line rendering quality on SGI hardware was far better as well. However, given SGI wasn't able to ship a new graphics system in perhaps 6 years at that point, and NVIDIA was launching a new architecture every two years, the reason to use SGI at big money customers quickly disappeared.
As for Rick Beluzzo, man, the was a buffoon. My first week at SGI was the week he became CEO, and in my very first allhands ever, someone asked something along the lines of, "We are hemmoraging a lot of money, what are you going to do about it"? He replied with, "Yeah, we are, but HP, E&S, etc, are hemmoraging a lot more and they have less in the bank, so we'll pick up their business". I should have quit my first week.