By William Fellows

Silicon Graphics Inc has appointed Bob Bishop as its new chairman and CEO, succeeding Rick Belluzzo who has fled the hot-seat for a non-CEO position at a company that supposedly does not compete with SGI. Sometime after delivering his latest SGI reorganization plan on August 10 Belluzzo informed the board of his intention to depart. Bishop was offered the job over the weekend and accepted it on Sunday.

SGI says it decided it could not afford the extended interim period a new CEO search would mean. It feared losing momentum for its new strategy that is based upon high-performance servers, visualization and broadband internet products. It did not offer the job to anyone else.

Why did it look inside? Bishop is credited with building and leading the SGI field organization from 1986 through 1995 when it represented half of the company’s revenue. Those were the golden years as far as SGI was concerned; its serious problems started in 1996 following its $730m acquisition of Cray Research Inc. Bishop took on more of a backseat advisory role after 1995, becoming chairman of the SGI World Trade Corp. He currently serves on various industry associations. We don’t know whether Bishop had been in the running when Belluzzo was appointed last January.

On a call yesterday Bishop, who also built and managed world sales organizations at DEC and Apollo Computer, said he was 100% behind the plan he inherits from Belluzzo, although some details of its execution may change. He said he was ready for what he believes will be the most important challenge of his career.

He answered all questions clearly and when asked how SGI had gotten itself into the parlous state it finds itself today was unequivocal about the course of events. He said SGI was now effectively returning to its original starting point. He believes that for fully five years SGI was unable to leverage the web, internet, IA-64, Linux and Nvidia – they mostly did not exist as they do today – and instead tried to do each of these things internally, and in a proprietary manner. It was very expensive and created severe resource allocation problems, he said.

SGI lured Hewlett-Packard Co computer supremo and Lew Platt heir- apparent Rick Belluzzo to be its CEO in January 1998. He must be kicking himself now. He could be sitting in CEO Carly Fiorina’s seat right now. Bishop owns 3.7 million shares of SGI stock.