Resignations at Cisco hint at internal power struggle
recode.net
recode.net
(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.
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' :)
if you have time to spare, watch it !
We don't need speech to be a monoculture for people to understand one another.
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
On the other hand....
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/12/networking-the-last... http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/10/datacenter-networks...
There is no way you can provide honest feedback.
cisco paid Stanford off later, although the author of that NOS is still unhappy.
[0]http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/collaborati...
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.
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.
It's "cloud based" which means you don't need to maintain a video conferencing box in the basement.
Anyways I digress. The Cat 2900 and Cat 5000 came from the Crescendo acquisition as did Mario Mazzola and Prem Jain.
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).
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".
[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)