A legendary racket from days past! Leave Cisco with technology and engineers, get generously funded by Cisco, get generously bought out by Cisco, inside Cisco enjoy sandbagged targets and guaranteed payouts, lather, rinse, repeat. Self-dealing masterpieces!
My impression from people who have been involved is that it's not just a self-enriching racket; mainline Cisco is actually really bad at building new products that aren't just minor variations on old ones. Sometimes they innovate through acquisitions, but if there's no external company to acquire sometimes you have to make your own to get your good engineers out of that environment of "sandbagged targets and guaranteed payouts" for a few years.
While the argument could be made that Cisco has had zero decent products in the last fifteen years, nearly (if not) all of the ones that could lay claim to the title came from this particular business arrangement. Referring to it as a racket or 'self-dealing' is simply hyperbole.
It is my understanding that Cisco was founded on router technology developed Stanford which was then patented and exploited by the company (despite Stanford's intention that it be public domain)[1]. I wonder if the cultural tone that that set is what, decades later, has landed them in this situation.
While things like Jabber have an obvious alternative (i.e. Slack), who can compete with Cisco in terms of their desk phones and meeting room equipment? I only ask because their hardware is so ingrained in the company I work for that even if I were somehow able to convince everyone that Slack was worth switching for, who the hell else am I gonna get video conferencing equipment like this[0] from?
Polycom and Huawei are the two next largest providers of telepresence equipment and there are a host of smaller competitors.
As far as phones Avaya is the big competitor in the enterprise space. Microsoft Skype for Business/Lync is also deployed many places for voice using phones from a variety of suppliers including Polycom and HP. Lately a lot of enterprises have started to move away from desk phones to using soft phones.
MPLS' impact at Cisco is similar to that of Jeff Dean and others at Google. They were responsible for creating Cisco's most successful products, so it's sad to see them leave. But the power struggle is definitely undeniable, as a lot of senior figures have departed Cisco.
I'm a bit biased here since I work doing development mostly aimed at a competitor of Cisco in the Unified Communications space, but after seeing a few presentations by Rowan Trollope at Enterprise Connect, I have the feeling all is not well at Cisco and this article seems to echo that.
At EC, I really felt like they were on the defense trying to market a product that's trying to be "cool like Slack" while chiding enterprise customers for being uncool and wanting things like control over upgrade roll-outs and being interested in "fake clouds"[1]. Their presentation of this new product had the feeling of an angry old man trying to sell mood rings to hipsters.
The attitude of the presenters bordered on insulting and I was reminded of a meeting with Cisco guys with a very similar attitude, almost decade ago, when my previous employer was trying to re-instate maintenance on our Cisco phone infrastructure. At the time, we were looking to either get maintenance or replace it with something else (Office Communications Server 2008 -- which hadn't been released yet, but which Microsoft was actively courting us to become a tester of with very good financial terms associated). The rep sarcastically said "What are you going to do, switch to Asterisk or LCS?"[2].
My recollection of parts of this is hazy, but IIRC, they weren't willing to budge on price and even found places that we had miscalculated the cost we already couldn't pay, resulting in a higher cost. In 15 years of dealing with vendor reps, I've never had a call that even came close to that one. I fielded two different calls within an hour of that meeting's end with both people saying the Cisco guys were "arrogant DICKS".
Within two years my previous employer ripped out all of our Cisco IP-PBX related devices, moved to OCS 2007 and the company has stayed with the Microsoft Solution of Various Names since. If the vendor reps were any indication, Cisco didn't believe there would ever be competition for their product, and had a very dim view of Microsoft (still seem to, today). Their new product (who's name escapes me) seems to be the direction they want to go, but they're late, and aren't as good as the competition.
[1] This was a phrase the Cisco folks seemed really attached to and I kept thinking that the one feature you want in a collaboration/"phone" system is stability. And the "fake clouds" were things like on-prem/cloud deployment options available from Microsoft and policies that embraced limited backward compatibility and controlled update roll-out. For me, the phrase became "fake clouds don't rain" (or at least when they do, you have some control over it).
[2] This is paraphrased, but not much. Microsoft had courted us at the time and we were involved in pre-release for OCS. We didn't actually migrate to LCS, we migrated to OCS while participating in the OCS R2 TAP. They provided us with people on-site that basically designed and helped us roll the solution out at no charge (they were supposed to be resources for the TAP program but they assisted with everything).
"If the vendor reps were any indication, Cisco didn't believe there would ever be competition for their product"
Familiar feeling. The explanation: there is no long-term horizon. All they care about is near-term bonus, and things that position them personally.
Companies with clearly-defined leading products are under permanent risk of being hijacked by sociopaths.
Engineers are intelligent, but we are focused on hard problems, and we are typically invested in the platform which limits our ability to manoeuvre.
The sociopaths have nothing better to do than spend all their day consolidating position, and they don't care if they have to destroy the mountain in order to take it. (Once a company has been pillaged, they can just go somewhere else and do it again.)
As an engineer, you will fight to kill this thing. But once you see it has succeeded in taking root, immediately try to get clear of it. I don't think this gets enough emphasis in our circles - we need a short phrase that captures the transition point. I've just read your blog and suggest "bed bugs".
I think you are referring to Cisco Spark. It sure looks like a copy of Slack, right down to the logo. Then again, there seems to be a market for "Enterprise" versions of popular web apps. (I too am biased here)
It had become known that Mario, Prem, and Luca were moving on, but the expectation was that Soni was sticking around and gaining more responsibility. Guess not. Unfortunate for Cisco.
[+] [-] vanessa98|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azernik|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] packetized|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mcbain|9 years ago|reply
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-cisco-showered-three-m...
[+] [-] iaw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outside1234|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccvannorman|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html
[+] [-] kijiki|9 years ago|reply
cisco paid Stanford off later, although the author of that NOS is still unhappy.
[+] [-] mkane848|9 years ago|reply
[0]http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/collaborati...
[+] [-] TorKlingberg|9 years ago|reply
It's "cloud based" which means you don't need to maintain a video conferencing box in the basement.
[+] [-] tssva|9 years ago|reply
As far as phones Avaya is the big competitor in the enterprise space. Microsoft Skype for Business/Lync is also deployed many places for voice using phones from a variety of suppliers including Polycom and HP. Lately a lot of enterprises have started to move away from desk phones to using soft phones.
[+] [-] thrwaway_711|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zump|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdip|9 years ago|reply
At EC, I really felt like they were on the defense trying to market a product that's trying to be "cool like Slack" while chiding enterprise customers for being uncool and wanting things like control over upgrade roll-outs and being interested in "fake clouds"[1]. Their presentation of this new product had the feeling of an angry old man trying to sell mood rings to hipsters.
The attitude of the presenters bordered on insulting and I was reminded of a meeting with Cisco guys with a very similar attitude, almost decade ago, when my previous employer was trying to re-instate maintenance on our Cisco phone infrastructure. At the time, we were looking to either get maintenance or replace it with something else (Office Communications Server 2008 -- which hadn't been released yet, but which Microsoft was actively courting us to become a tester of with very good financial terms associated). The rep sarcastically said "What are you going to do, switch to Asterisk or LCS?"[2].
My recollection of parts of this is hazy, but IIRC, they weren't willing to budge on price and even found places that we had miscalculated the cost we already couldn't pay, resulting in a higher cost. In 15 years of dealing with vendor reps, I've never had a call that even came close to that one. I fielded two different calls within an hour of that meeting's end with both people saying the Cisco guys were "arrogant DICKS".
Within two years my previous employer ripped out all of our Cisco IP-PBX related devices, moved to OCS 2007 and the company has stayed with the Microsoft Solution of Various Names since. If the vendor reps were any indication, Cisco didn't believe there would ever be competition for their product, and had a very dim view of Microsoft (still seem to, today). Their new product (who's name escapes me) seems to be the direction they want to go, but they're late, and aren't as good as the competition.
[1] This was a phrase the Cisco folks seemed really attached to and I kept thinking that the one feature you want in a collaboration/"phone" system is stability. And the "fake clouds" were things like on-prem/cloud deployment options available from Microsoft and policies that embraced limited backward compatibility and controlled update roll-out. For me, the phrase became "fake clouds don't rain" (or at least when they do, you have some control over it).
[2] This is paraphrased, but not much. Microsoft had courted us at the time and we were involved in pre-release for OCS. We didn't actually migrate to LCS, we migrated to OCS while participating in the OCS R2 TAP. They provided us with people on-site that basically designed and helped us roll the solution out at no charge (they were supposed to be resources for the TAP program but they assisted with everything).
[+] [-] cturner|9 years ago|reply
Familiar feeling. The explanation: there is no long-term horizon. All they care about is near-term bonus, and things that position them personally.
Companies with clearly-defined leading products are under permanent risk of being hijacked by sociopaths.
Engineers are intelligent, but we are focused on hard problems, and we are typically invested in the platform which limits our ability to manoeuvre.
The sociopaths have nothing better to do than spend all their day consolidating position, and they don't care if they have to destroy the mountain in order to take it. (Once a company has been pillaged, they can just go somewhere else and do it again.)
As an engineer, you will fight to kill this thing. But once you see it has succeeded in taking root, immediately try to get clear of it. I don't think this gets enough emphasis in our circles - we need a short phrase that captures the transition point. I've just read your blog and suggest "bed bugs".
[+] [-] TorKlingberg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0FCEE9602718|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twblalock|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogomipz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irq|9 years ago|reply