The Cisco of today is something of an enigma. Built upon the shoulders of its
engineering past, the Cisco of today is a marketing giant on par with Microsoft.
They've traded in their close relations with engineering and technical folk for
executive lunches and golf trips. This has resulted in skyhigh profits coming
from, not too surprisingly, skyhigh prices. You don't even want to hear the
kind of discounts they were offering us to try to prevent the loss of our core
router network business (yes, they lost).
Nevertheless, almost any network of any size will still have a considerable Cisco presence within it. My workplace is no exception, but they are no longer dominating our network. They have to compete for our business and they do not like it. Its a shame. They still have some very good products, but I cannot agree with the "We're worth the extra money" mentality when they are so very much more expensive. It seems to be a top-down approach driven by their corporate headquarters. I guess its their strategy.
They still have a very good website. Its not quite as friendly as it used to be, but no one else does it any better.
I find myself quite often wondering what the people at Cisco are thinking.
It was a terrible shame when McAffee bought Network General. Such a wonderful
company destroyed before my very eyes. NetGen was replaced by
NetAss. (appropriate..)
Although the Cinco Net-Xray product (you know, NAI's new GUI sniffer) is coming
along, I no longer consider NAI to be the only game in town. The GUI sniffer
is still a good product, but NAI doesn't hold the respect of the network field
the way that NGC once did.
It wasn't the product shenanigans that killed the company as much as it was the annihilation of the world's greatest network education center. Such a terrible loss.
Network General has been separated into a separate company again, but I rather
tend to think its too late.
Ethereal
is here now and does everything you'd need from a sniffer system. I was never
particularly impressed by the "expert" system anyway. It was wrong
far too often and way too fond of very generic answers. Router storm. Yeah
right.
What a great company SGI was. While companies like IBM and SUN were just too
darned busy to be bothered with itty bitty $150k purchases, SGI rose to the
occassion. They served us very well for many years, but in the end Linux was
just too strong to ignore. We initially adopted SGI/Intel hardware, but SGI,
like so many companies before them, made the decision that they knew better
than we did. Perhaps their push to IA64 even before the chip was released
should be viewed as visionary, but by discontinuing the older Pentium servers
out from underneath us and insisting that we beta IA64, they simply cost
themselves a good and loyal customer. Such a shame. All but one SGI server
has now been replaced by generic Intel hardware. The servers are faster and
cheaper now.
Return to the Techie page
Techie: Hall of Fame
Techie: Hall of Shame
Return to Christopher's home page