Inside Facebook's plan to eat another $350B IT market

Think of it in the same terms as any other service you're contemplating: do you want to pay other people for proprietary stuff, or do you want to pay your own people to develop skills around open stuff?

cisco has an incentive to not look foolish, but they don't particularly care about any small or mid-size accounts. Your people have an incentive to care about your security and functionality. Weigh up the advantages and disadvantages and make your choice appropriately.

Well mostly because they don't rely on any legacy code base but they can write it all by themselves. Also Google has somewhat of an reputation for security other than Cisco.

Google can better control their designs and supply chain than Cisco.

Cisco's priorities are more directly profits. Google's are often more security related, though they can profit from being more secure.

Google rolling its own hardware is a key security pillar. This is a good read on the topic:

https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper

(work at G)

At Google scale you can roll your own crypto. Or routers. Or hardware. Or CPU.

Maybe not smart to roll your own everything, but a few of them sure.

This Exactly. Companies like Amazon, Google, FB, Microsoft need 10% of those features. However oftentimes there's a bug in the 90% of the software that they don't use which impacts something in the 10% they do use. This causes a long delay in the roll out of fixes and creates a lot of disruption in scaling out the network. Furthermore Cisco must test all those features before they can ship a new product. This results in delay of new physical layer technology into the network. What the big 4 want is that new tech to get to market faster so they can keep up with the demand. The problem ultimately is the pace of network technology is not keeping up with the demand of the webscales.