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Not every business model you dislike is rent seeking. I really wish people would quit throwing that term around -- it means something and it's very rare that I see it used properly.

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.

You're right, I did abuse the term "rent seeking" but history really does show that high margin businesses would rather go out of business than stay competitive.

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)

You bemoan rent seeking but seem to adore China which is the ultimate rent seeker as it bans companies and competition arbitrarily than any other nation.

> You bemoan rent seeking but seem to adore China which is the ultimate rent seeker as it bans companies and competition arbitrarily than any other nation.

China doesn't ban "companies and competition arbitrarily," they have fairly clear goals which are just different than those of neoliberal free-market types.

Yes, that’s the primary meaning of “arbitrarily”.

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.

Yes, to take over the world and turn every person of different ethnicity than Han Chinese into a slave or servant.

Look how entire effin' world treated them up to this point - exactly as ultra low wage servants and slaves.

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.

>foxconn suicides

>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.

The world treated them well.

> 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.

There are very few actual sinophiles in the western-aligned democracies, and I sure as hell ain't one of them, I have no stake in US-China hate wars. This is not some Trump rally where ad hominem attacks end any discussion and you triumphally ride to sunset.

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.

Yeah, clear goals to rent seek. And eventually dominate the world.

https://westminster-institute.org/events/how-china-sees-the-...

There was a short window in the late 90s where Cisco (and maybe one or two others) were the only companies providing something that was suddenly in high demand.

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.

There’s Cisco and “Cisco”. Some of the Cisco “smart switch” hardware, sold under the Cisco name since the Linksys acquisition, is unbelievably bad.

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.

Meraki is hot garbage too.

> ...all on the strength of network admins who didn't want to learn anything new to move to the cloud.

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.

Keep the same interface at what cost? Public cloud is already expensive and Cisco-on-AWS or VMware-on-AWS are really expensive. In many cases customers are buying the same functionality twice which feels exploitative.

I don't think anyone is buying Cisco-on-AWS at anywhere near the same volume as Cisco gear in its heyday. It's likely for applications where traffic throughput is low or unimportant — e.g. training labs, etc. These are likely applications where it would have been cost prohibitive to buy a "real" Cisco router.

I'd be pretty surprised if people were running an actual large production network on Cisco-AMIs-on-AWS.

Is people paying amounts of money to a company is the problematic part? I mean, I get it, but that is not enough literal justification to single out Cisco Systems from myriad other large corporations.

> Isn't "keep the same interface when you move to the cloud" a desirable thing?

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”.

I worked for Cisco, and I agree. I was in what the local government had been told was a special research unit in order to get a billion dollar tax break, fixing decade old bugs in some stupid built-in ping tester that old customers liked.

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.

AMIs are the most profitable because they don’t need to manufacture physical hardware/ASICs and can just charge $X per hour for software that was already written for their hardware. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to chose to do this and it’s not because network engineers are lazy. For example, if your business uses AnyConnect for corporate VPN on prem, it might make sense to have a cloud instance as well for better integration. In AWS, Transit Gateway is a pretty recent thing and prior to that you would need to use cloud routers to route between VPCs since VPC peering is not transitive.

I really like some of the Cisco gear at work, ACI is a great software defined network solution and the UCS are by far the nicest blades system I ever used.

But I have only have an idea about the cost... probably expensive!