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.
(At the risk of getting down voted)
Cisco is a sales driven company not an engineering company. Barring a few business units (and that too I'm being generous) there is absolutely no innovation or drive to build new products. It's a terrible place to work if you are an engineer with aspirations to tackle engineering challenges.
> Cisco is a sales driven company not an engineering company.
> Barring a few business units (and that too I'm being generous)
> there is absolutely no innovation or drive
> to build new products.
this is _exactly_ right. for example, nick-feamster (formerly gatech, and now at princeton) hosted a google hangout with nick-mckeown (stanford)
as part of his sdn mooc on coursera. the hangout video is approx. an hour long, and is available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abXezfJsqso
initial 15-20 minutes of this video describes the experience of these n/w researchers (mckeown, cassado etc) when they
presented their (sdn) idea to execs at csco, their (exec's) rejection of the said idea, which indicating to them (the
researchers) that it (the idea) passed the so called 'idea-smell-test' :)
Nothing wrong with the parentheses, I find myself doing that a lot as well. The issue is that the majority of the parenthetical statements are not useful information and not necessary to the point they are trying to make. That compared with seemingly nonsensical abbreviation and overall lack of coherent punctuation makes it an experience to read.
I read the comment above as disapproving of the all of the parentheses in the gp post.
If you remove the posts from people who write that way from the total we are closer to a monoculture.
The difference between having one fewer way of writing and literally having one way of writing is the size of the rhetorical exaggeration in my comment
Also, see the reactions from companies with big datacenters who have had to internally evolve off Big Netgear in a similar fashion to moving off Big Iron years before:
I used to work in one of the cloud/virt groups there. The management (from the first line to the top) lack vision both technically and otherwise. You have many teams, many directors, managers, and about 200 engineers working on some product, and this product has become so bloated. The engineers don't know what this product is meant for, except doing their part. This lead to resume enhancing technologies, which end up bloating the whole product. I can't provide more details here.
I used to work at Meraki (pre- and post-acquisition). Even internally, the message coming down was that we were being kept in San Francisco so that we would not get bogged down in, well, being Cisco. Even after couple of years of 100% year-on-year growth, the engineering team there was still smaller than the Cisco teams working on some individual product launches.
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.
By all objective measures he did a phenomenal job at Nest. He started and sold it for $3.2B. The fact that he failed to continue to be successful post-acquisition, is hardly a "poor" overall record.
I would describe his exit as the only real thing he was successful at. The product is not selling, his employees are all quitting, the acquirer is pissed, the acquisitions he made are all pissed, product development is stalled, Google had to go to plan B with Google Home, ...
Yes, and all of that just shows he isn't perfect. But Tony Fadell will have no problem raising hundreds of millions for his next venture, joining a VC firm, or joining another company as a C-level executive.
Which is interesting because he doesn't really need to do anything else does he? Like you point out, having a $3.2B buyout is pretty much a home run in anybody's book.
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?
Thanks for the link! I'm low on the totem pole with these sort of decisions, but I'll be sure to keep this bookmarked for any future meeting or opportunity to pivot away from Cisco :)
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.
Cool, I'll have to look into both! Huawei feels like an "Oh, right, of course" answer but Polycom doesn't ring any bells.
Interesting observation on the soft phones trend, though. In my work environment our Cisco phones might as well be softphones since everything's rigged through Jabber. Give us a webcam instead of the desk phone and I don't see any loss of functionality.
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.
Maybe he meant the Catalyst 2900 which was really a 2 slot version of the 5000 with the sup card and a 12 or 24 port line card already screwed in. I did a large deployment of Lightstreams (It think 1010s), Cat 5000s and Cat 2900s. This was prior to official availability of the Cat 5000 and 2900. They were running beta code and we had to upgrade them every couple of days. We hit a stable enough build about a week before going live to coincide with the official availability of the 5000s. Our customer got a big break on the equipment but had to be live by general availability of the catalysts to be a demonstration customer. The chain smoking tool of an engineer Cisco sent, he like to brag his employee number was in the teens, instilled a distrust of Cisco support engineers that future Cisco engineers have reinforced, the good ones have been few and far between. That system made it live despite his best efforts.
Anyways I digress. The Cat 2900 and Cat 5000 came from the Crescendo acquisition as did Mario Mazzola and Prem Jain.
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".
Agreed. I think the other part of it is organizational blindness, as well. They reacted to OCS in the same manner that Microsoft reacted to the iPhone. They were the established player with a mature platform and here came along a service that did things radically different and lacked, what they perceived, as the major features that customers in that space were looking for so they simply laughed at the product. Companies certainly didn't flock to it like people flocked to the iPhone (a trick I think only Apple can pull off), but by comparison, Cisco's offering provided a far less integrated experience at a greater cost and once those back-end features got worked out (or were no longer relevant), they had a surprise competitor with (at the time[1]) a much lower price. Couple that with the fact that people are far more comfortable with making video/voice calls from a PC due to Skype (consumer) and the idea of getting rid of your desk phone[2] and taking it with you on your laptop for all of your "business phone needs" isn't so radical anymore.
[1] At the time, there wasn't even a comparison. It took far fewer servers, cheap (by comparison) licensing that gave you dial-in conferencing for the cost of the server and the call's cost (no additional per-minute surcharge for the privilege of using a bridge). I haven't priced a Cisco equivalent in a while so that may all be different, today.
[2] You can still have a phone with Skype for Business (and they're great phones from what I've seen) and many companies still pop those phones on desks. I worked at Global Crossing when we switched, though, and we required a departmental waiver to get a physical phone (to save money). People did get decent, certified, headsets, but we made the switch the way people take band-aids off and there was a lot of bleeding in the first couple of months. It died down once people got used to it and within a half-year, meeting rooms went empty in favor of calls with desktop sharing (one can multitask and no need to walk down the hall carrying your laptop). Laziness always wins. :o)
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)
Yes, that was it. When I talked to one of the guys about the service, it was filled with a lot of "well, it doesn't do that, yet"'s. But they all seemed to think that this product would replace all other existing collaboration platforms, including WebEx/Skype for Business. Maybe if Cisco wasn't running it, perhaps.
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.
