Cisco Systems and Financialization
ineteconomics.org
ineteconomics.org
I mean, always rent-seeking, always overpriced. My first exposure to the internet was through the network stacks of Solaris and the open source Linux and my first instinct was that high-priced routers didn't have to exist. That wasn't entirely right because those routers really do have accelerator hardware and are economical to handle high traffic volumes but the real thing that has kept Cisco going is that people know how to set up networks with their stuff.
I went to a conference put on by AWS where I skipped a lot of the overcrowded technical talks and went to more of the business talks particularly those who were selling AMIs (something I tried for a while) and the happiest people there were from Cisco who boasted that the AMIs they made running their network software where the most profitable product they'd ever made all on the strength of network admins who didn't want to learn anything new to move to the cloud.
When rent-seeking is so profitable you just can't afford to innovate, that's the problem.
Cisco's value is in their huge userbase, (at least historically, not sure what the story is recently) access to their TAC, and their ability to absorb finger-pointing. They're expensive, they throw their weight around, there's more exciting or outright better options, but to claim they're providing little to no value for the money you pay them is absurd.
If people weren't afraid of China, Cisco would be gone already.
If Xi could have just put off the scary behavior to his successor, our carmakers and other major industries would have put themselves out of their misery too. (e.g. GM's plan is to have electric Cadillacs and I guess everybody else rides a bike)
China doesn't ban "companies and competition arbitrarily," they have fairly clear goals which are just different than those of neoliberal free-market types.
Party elites ban companies and competition at their whim for purely their own selfish ends, rather than according to principle.
They act as the arbiters of the matter.
Read a bit about british opium wars if you actually care about the topic. We got so used to cheap chinese goods, yet nobody gave a nano fraction of a fuck that fellow human beings destroyed their lives in horrible conditions absolutely unacceptable anywhete in the west, including children just that you could have (massively overpriced) iphone or some fashion sneakers. I am still waiting on a single social justice warrior here to abandon say Apple brand because of frequent suicides at their Foxconn plants.
How long did you expect them to bow and work for nothing? What goes around, comes around eventually. West really doesnt have any moral upper hand here, I wish people had a bit more humility.
>horrible conditions in manufacturing sector
Does the chinese government not have a say in this? This is like saying the consumers of US cotton before 1860s were responsible for slavery in the US. Consumers & companies are complicit, but the Chinese government is surely the primary author of the policies that permit the horrible conditions in those factories.
> Read a bit about british opium wars
Sinophiles bellyache about the opium war but conveniently forget recent history.
Read about events during WW2: The US supported China in WW2 which happened much recently than the opium wars.
Read about events after WW2: The US/West gave China economic prosperity through asymmetric deals that decimated the Western middle class while China continued to grow at the expense of the West (through unfair trade deals, outright theft, flagrant violations of international labor and pollution standards, etc.).
Instead of a fake humility, I really wish people read more.
Only so long till China can rent seek from the world before the world says no.
It is not just the West that has an issue with China. India, Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan all have issues. Last time I saw a map, they were not in the West.
The only reason west gave them work was they were so brutally cheap, and people simply didnt care why. Even if quality was lacking. It was west doing its own shooting in its own foot, everybody knew what kind of deal they get with China, but greed and immediqte profits overshadowed everything else. Dont blame stupidity on anybody but stupid.
They set the rules on their own soil and followed through, nothing more. No big fan of them, but instead of childish demonizing which got us nowhere in past 2 decades, what about smarting up a bit and understanding both sides and what led up to this situation.
https://westminster-institute.org/events/how-china-sees-the-...
Most networking people know you can get the performance of Cisco gear for a fraction of the price - but the rest of that price is basically insurance that it won’t fail.
I’d never pay full price for it for myself, but every time I’ve worked with Cisco gear it’s been quite nice.
I forget the precise problem I wasted hours on a few years ago, but one of these devices was not actually capable of switching packets correctly.
Anyone who thinks this way is super cynical, including Cisco salespeople.
Isn't "keep the same interface when you move to the cloud" a desirable thing? This is like saying "People who use RHEL AMIs on AWS are lazy because they don't want to learn anything new, they should just migrate en masse to Lambdas or some other cool new tech".
It's ridiculous that we bemoan the state of moving-every-night Javascript framework on HN and also claim that network admins "don't want to learn anything new" just because they pay Cisco for working AMIs.
I think you're just jealous that network admins don't have to deal with the messes of Next.js and Kubernetes ;) I wish I could get the stability of the Cisco CLI in my day-to-day work on cloud infrastructure.
I'd be pretty surprised if people were running an actual large production network on Cisco-AMIs-on-AWS.
NO.
I wish I could somehow bold that and make it 100 pt size.
The cloud is the interface. It’s a distributed multi-tenant operating system with accounts, ACLs, event logs, scheduled tasks, processes (lambda), and so forth.
Most critically: it has a fully virtualised software defined network already!
Layering anything on top is absolute madness. It’s complex enough as it is.
The built-in networking is integrated into the monitoring, has the same RBAC model as everything else, and can be templated out using a uniform API and declarative deployment syntax.
Something like Cisco will sit on top of that like a steaming hot turd on a manicured lawn.
Last but definitely not least: the cloud-native network is hardware accelerated into FPGAs (Azure) or custom silicon (AWS). There is absolutely no way for a vendor like Cisco to even begin to approach the scalability or the latency of the native network in software.
A customer of mine has made the catastrophic mistake of adopting Aviatrix instead of educating their network team (or simply making them redundant.)
Aviatrix introduced a latency overhead of 3-5ms within the same zone compared to the native latency of 80 microseconds! That’s a brutal amount of overhead for everyone else to pay for “our network staff act like dinosaurs before the impact and I’m too scared to tell them their careers are over”.
But I have only have an idea about the cost... probably expensive!
Cisco's innovation was weighted down by the solid gold boat anchor known as classic IOS. The biggest innovation I saw in my team was to carve out a piece of the 90's style C code from the embedded (i.e. untestable) system as a library and test it on Linux with C++ and valgrind.
I... sort of doubt that? First of all, the Cisco strategy has pretty much always been to acquire the lead player(s) in any sector it's truly interested in. R&D for possibly emerging markets is seen as a distraction that's best done outside the company: just fund it, spin it out even, then buy it back later when it turns out to be a good idea.
Secondly, Cisco has been burnt badly in the past by telco-related technologies (DSL and cable), where its US customers (Comcast, AT&T et al) rewarded its significant investments by rapidly turning to cheap commoditized competitors instead. Same thing happened in the 3G era to Ericsson/Nokia (with world-wide customers), and until the much more recent "well, you can't really use any Chinese equipment in your telco network" trend, you can't really blame anyone for actively ignoring that market.
Finally, it's debatable how much money there actually is to be made in '5G' as a standalone technology: like land-line telephony, the stack is pretty much indistinguishable from 'regular' datacenter tech these days, and apart from some niche management software and ultra-specialized radio hardware, it's hard to see where Cisco could have made a real difference, given the total lack of promising US-based (or even EU-based) acquisition targets in that space.
I mean for sure I agree with their conclusion that Cisco has neglected innovation but they don't really expound on Cisco's real missteps clearly.
I guess I recall some supporting facts; closure of NH optics plant, Webex splintered to Zoom, but there's just a political undercurrent here to maintain there's some conspiracy and irrevocable bond between the US and Cisco as leading infrastructure hardware manufacturer, that seems to be the focus of the article. Hence, propaganda.
Despite a large market share, often with similar orgs, these attributes make them easy prey for startups without these dysfunctions.
One holistic solution is to do as Sir Richard Branson: continually striving to have it both ways: operate with the nimbleness of a startup while seeking economies of scale and automation of a megacorp. Largely, the cultural attitude is the source problem and the source of solution.
The whole concept of a public company is to generate dividends for shareholders. Why invest if there is never any payout for the investment?
Of course this means there is less to invest in R&D, but they got to use that investor money to build the firm earlier.
The investors want money before they die of old age.
Dividends and buybacks are sort of an investment into your infrastructure, because the money goes through your investors into investments in the same general area.
The only reason companies are doing buybacks is because it increases the CEO's comp (if you reduce shares, you increase EPS...many bonus packages are based on EPS). If anything it has a negative impact on returns because companies will typically buy back shares when they are overvalued.
I think people assume that there must be a reason why companies are doing all this...there isn't. Companies are run for executives. It was bad ten years ago, since Covid it has reached comedic levels (where you have executives on packages at loss making companies that are meaningful percentages of the company market cap).
Big telcos have enough influence to push Cisco around, because Cisco competitors DO exist.
> over the past two decades, the United States has fallen behind global competitors, including China, in mobile-communication infrastructure—specifically 5G and Internet of Things (IoT).