> Linux would have made a much better choice as a transitional platform from IRIX.
It would have, but this was 1998, so very few of us knew this at the time. I don't know if you remember the tech zeitgeist in 1998, but Linux was still a pretty hardcore geek alternative at the time, maybe like Vim today. NT had things like journaled filesystems.
You can delve into history to see what the Linux community was talking about at the time:
http://old.lwn.net/archives/
http://old.lwn.net/1998/1001/
"Intel and Netscape are now officially investors in Red Hat Software. A year ago such a thing would have been almost unthinkable. But times have changed."
"With this release, the GNOME desktop is reaching a usable state."
http://old.lwn.net/1998/1008/
"Expect that, with the introduction of pre-installed Linux systems from vendors like Gateway, IBM, Dell or others, the number of people searching out a Linux VAR in order to get a pre-installed Linux system will rapidly dwindle."
http://old.lwn.net/1998/1015/
"Oracle has announced that it will ship and support a Linux distribution."
http://old.lwn.net/1998/1022/press.php3
"Like sex in high school, everyone's talking about Linux, but is anyone doing it?"
http://old.lwn.net/1998/1029/
"140,000 Mexican school labs to be outfitted with Linux and GNOME." (That was the "Red Escolar" or "Scholar Net" project. Its failure is described in http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/08/45737: "RedEscolar, or "Scholar Net," has put computers in 4,500 schools, but fewer than 20 are equipped with GNU/Linux machines. The rest are running Windows 95 or 98.".)
So, from the standpoint of 2011, it's easy to see that committing head-on to Linux could have saved SGI. But, at the time, it was a risky decision.
They did actually start to hitch their wagon to Linux a year later: Scott Bekker "SGI Backs Away from Windows NT - Silicon Graphics - Company Business and Marketing". ENT. FindArticles.com. 11 Feb, 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FOX/is_15_4/ai_55675...
Rick Belluzzo was the CEO who made the NT decision. WP says had been working at HP for the last 23 years, not Microsoft, but he did take a job at Microsoft after being deposed at SGI. WP also says his only degree is a BS in accounting from Golden Gate University, a vocational school, so he's probably not very smart.
Here's what he said about working with Bill Gates: "I was always surprised how much Bill knew. I wonder how you find time in the day to be on top of how many things Bill seemed to be on top of. Bill is so passionate about technology, and he really is in the right role to focus the vast majority of his time."
To me, that sounds like typical non-hacker cluelessness. So maybe it's not that surprising that Rick was blind to the finer points of technical risk, compatibility, portability, and how the free-software community worked. (He was also largely responsible for committing HP to Itanic, effectively killing PA-RISC.)