SGI was already moribund in 1997. Executives made a conscious choice to pivot. It didn't work out, but it is real hard for me to believe they could have done better with a redoubled focus on MIPS development they could not afford.
Then a bunch of the graphics people (who did the GPU for the Nintendo 64) went to found ArtX [1], which got bought by ATI.
There was also the ill-fated Fahrenheit project.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/2002/05/06/0506sun.html#703713c16a5e [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArtX
And I'm not saying not reacting to Itanium means go all in on your existing ISA and your existing business model. That wasn't my argument.
My argument was don't go all out on everything that currently makes you money and your costumers expect for a totally unproven architecture that even if it works out means that you are just gone be a commodity provider with commodity software. Something totally outside of the whole history of Silicon graphics.