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Cisco Eclipses Microsoft As 'Most Valuable Company'
Anonymous Coward writes: "'On an official basis on the Nasdaq, Cisco's stock closed up 1-9/16 at a record 79-3/8 while Microsoft eased 3/16 to 111-11/16. Based on those prices and on fully diluted stock totals from quarterly statements, Cisco ended the day with a stock market value of $579.2 billion, slightly ahead of Microsoft's $578.2 billion. On Thursday, Cisco briefly overtook Microsoft, earning the moniker of the most monied.' This is expected to continue. See NewsAlert's story for more details."
Stock evaluations are far from the only way to measure a company's worth, but they certainly are convenient. Cisco seems to have avoided much of the limelight (and searchlights) that Microsoft seems to lives beneath, though in a similar time period it's established a similar market dominance. Is it because Cisco doesn't live by "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"?
Now that you mention McDonald's; Sysco makes fry grease, don't they? What's all this about surpassing Microsoft. How does fry grease have anything to do with routers ....?
I don't know nuttin' 'bout no routers, but I can say this: At my VLC (Very Large Corporation) we are using two of the four existing models in the US of this huge Cisco router. This thing is four feet tall, people. It's supporting a 100-mbit Layer III switched-to-the-desktop VLAN network. Yippie shit.
And it blows. The network is slow, and pathetically unreliable. It probably drops 50% of the packets that it handles. By way of demonstration: In my area of the building we've installed our own server for keeping large files and gotten off the VLAN and I can't believe the difference. It's like night and day. Files that used to take six hours on the VLAN to copy now take twenty minutes. That's not a joke. It's pathetic.
My understanding is that we somehow ended up as a test site for these things. AND THEY BLOW. Nuff said?
What's the secret to getting this great Cisco service? Do you need a support contract? We (a research group at a university) tried to contact Cisco about purchasing some router equipment. We didn't even get a return call from the sales rep. Is it because the educational sales are so discounted that they don't care?
you just better hope your ISP doesn't get on Cisco's bad side. There have already been reports that they have sabotaged Bell Atlantic's networks because of some squabbles over router pricing. Seems Bell Atlantic's negotiating team pissed off Cisco and Cisco "mistakenly" loaded their routers with beta software. Bell Atlantic lost dozens of large sized (20,000 +) customers as well as tons of consumer customers (mostly DSL).
Really? The CCIE that was here on contract the other day didn't seem to know a damn thing. One of our techs was reading to him out of the "manual" and showing him what he was doing wrong... and he never did get our IPX routing set up... he had to turn it over to a more senior engineer.
But hey, they have a good reputation.
Expect Janet Reno to come knocking any day now.
not much point to the internet if you don't have applications to run that distribute data over said internet. those applications, probably for the next 50 years, will be written and run on desktop os owned by microsoft
You're thinking of IGRP/EIGRP. They also redistribute routes to and from every other routing protocol known to man. Good ones like BGP, and old brain-dead ones like RIP. This is really not a problem.
I personally like the original grits boy...you know why? Because HE IS ME !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Cisco likes to think of itself as a software company, not a hardware company. weird but true.
hahaha. hahaha. americans, those
descendants of robbers, losers and
scum of europe. my grandfathers house
is older than your entire nation,
bigboy. poor bastard.
I would hardly call a billion dollars "slightly ahead" :)
dude, slashdot really sucks shit. this isnt news. the slashdot moderators are fucking idiots. fuck them all!!! natalie portman!
That's not true, japs do have smaller dicks.
Have you ever heard of a Cisco Certified Network? A network can only be cisco certified if it uses only cisco based products. Networks that are Cisco Certified get large discounts on Cisco products. Therefore a network company is very reluctant to use other routers, since there relationship with cisco will be destroyed. Is that not an abuse of monopoly products?
I'll remind you of your laissez-faire attitude when i come round to fuck your wife and daughter. Mind I don't tolerate whiners. I can fuck your bitches both with one ball and beat you brainless with the other. So repeat after me: might makes right. That's what i want to hear you say when I'm zipping up and headed back on my way.
It would be great to see a reuptable company, such as Cisco buy MS out possibly to settle it's case with the government or umm ... to get rid of MS overall. :>
But their women have tighter pussies.
Sorry, but I doubt Cisco is going to throw IOS away and switch to QNX OR Linux. That'd be like me saying I want my next microwave to come with Linux as it's OS. WHY? Embedded systems deserve embedded OS's that are tiny and meet the exact needs of the product and NOTHING more. That said, I use NetBSD for a router/firewall running NAT ONLY because I couldn't afford a small Cisco box to do the same thing. Unfortunately with quality comes high price.
after trying out Gnutella for two days of nonstop downloading, i feel there is going to be an incredible bandwidth shortage soon.
Yes... Cisco developed EIGRP as a hybrid routing protocol that mixes link state and distance vector protocols, and it works well in a dynamic environment, but the routers still support RIPv1,RIPv2,OSPF,ISIS, etc.... You're not forced to go the route of EIGRP! -- network engineer @ cisco
shuddup. who cares. I read /. for the comments by users. I read AP/UPI wires for timely news.
If you knew what the fuck you were talking about, it might be a good post. Cisco makes SHITTY access routers.
Yeah, Cisco really sneaked into the market. It's a bit like an obese white guy sneaking into a Black Panther meeting.
Get a fucking clue nimrod. "In my EXPERIENCE" ok, so that's what, two years of vo-tech and an MSCE certificate?
is your grandfather's house bathed in nuclear radiation? you are why we nuke dumb fucks.
lets also stop saying /. and start saying 31337
If you read /. because it posts things fast then you have no clue what /. is about. In part is a democratic vote by sheer numbers of requests for submissions which takes time. There are better places to read timely news.
cisco holds the crown for the biggest increase in the 1990s. "The next Microsoft" is Cisco and has been for while. Whats even funnier is the founder/owners of cisco sold allmost all thier stock in the early 90s -- had they held it they would be Gates-like rich. Instead they are poor paupers with a few hundred million.
the only thing crappy are the complainers. complainers about complainers are even worse.
Come on, some people still think electricity just comes out of the wall.
You mean it doesn't?
yeah, those are always cool! i like to see at least one per day.
There there now, Mr. Gates, there's no need to get your panties in a knot. You should have realized all along that Microsoft wasn't going to last forever-- certainly not in the face of the miraculous rise of true technological advances over Microsoft, like Linux. At least now you have learned-- liars and cheats are always defeated by their more honest opponents.
not yet any nukes have hitted my country,
but there's no doubt the time will come,
'cos it's the only way for you to compensate
your fat brains, retards.
what about capital, cash reserves, real estate...oh fuck it....you dumb bastards are all alike
There is only one company outside of Cisco who has a license to IOS, and it isn't one of the big players.
Cisco doesn't license IOS to anyone. The only reason this company has it is that years ago Cisco needed money and so this company bought an IOS license.
Thanks guys :)
i have a bigger cock beeyatch! nuff said
i posted a picture of it for beeyatchs like you. it's here
Next time you feel the need to open your mouth you should think about whether you have anything of worth to offer up.
The numbers that are being thrown around here are ALL stock price * # of shares outstanding. That determines the market capitalization, or "worth" of a company. If you wanted to buy all of MS tomorrow you'd have to $578 billion. See here.
This is big news on wall street. Many mutual funds and large investors are going to be looking to dump their Microsoft stock for Cisco. The potential fallout from the decision coming thursday is another possible problem for MSFT. If I had any, I'd be looking to get rid of my Microsoft stock first thing monday morning. But I don't, so I'll be shorting it.
we will make sure to "hitted" your country in the next war.
i saw this story on all the wires friday, when it was actually news then. just like with the wired article about the dot com revolt, it's old news. slashdot really needs to get up to speed. this used to be the place to find something new.
this place has turned to shit in the last few months
I highly doubt that Linux routers will make a noticable impact in Cisco's success.
Well whoop de damn doo !! FallLine has spoken, so it must be true. Ok folks, let's put those Linux routers down...show's over....nothing to see here.
You think someone like BellAtlantic would be semi-clueful about their own routers. Sounds more like they botched something and are trying to finger a supplier (Cisco) for the problem, or just trying to get a leg up in some contract negotiation. (I imagine a buttload of equipment is going in to support DSL/Cable broadband - a small concession on a supplier's part could add to hundreds of millions of dollars.) This sort of thing is a pretty common business tactic.
Thank you for changing the comment submission form so that it uses a GET form submission rather than PUT.
That's POST, not PUT, idiot. And they haven't changed it. It still uses POST. And if you're smart, like "President Clinton" (who did some automated trolling during a story about Inprise a while back), you can still write a program to spam the hell out of Slashdot and restore Trolling Tuesday to its former glory.
I wonder if the 70-second delay really matters. If you post a whole load of comments repeatedly, they'll just each take 70 seconds to appear. Unless it's an exponential back-off delay, but that would be difficult to implement.
WonkoSlice --"Cisco Value Rose Above Microsoft View Responses (0)"
Slashdot -- "Cisco Eclipses Microsoft As 'Most Valuable Company' (187 comments)" and counting...
Thank you for changing the comment submission form so that it uses a GET form submission rather than PUT. As a serial troller, I can tell you that the PUT form submission, with the 70 second delay in comment posting, put the fear of God in me on several occasions, what with the blank comment text box. Having to see that empty box and thinking for a second that all the hard work that went into my trolls was for naught almost brought a tear to me eye.
Of course a forward and reload would resubmit the comment, but it's always better to see the actual comment after getting hit with the 70 second penalty.
Thanks Slashdot !!!
You are absolutely correct! 100%.
Not to mention:
Cisco makes quality products.
Cisco has a far more stable future, owing to the increasingly networked nature of our world.
Rock on, Cisco!
Here's my web pages
.A share of MSFT is more than just a baseball card with Bill Gates' picture on it. It's a small piece of Microsoft, which includes a very small fraction of its assets, real estate and cash included. Compaines are valued based on their market cap, which is just the number of outstanding shares multiplied by the share price. If you think CSCO/MSFT shouldn't be the two highest valued companies in the world, then sell their stock short and go buy your F or EK or something. Just don't come crying to me when big bad Mr. Greenspan steals your old economy profits and leaves your net worth in the toilet.
Actually, a single share would have become 288, (as there have been 7 2-1 splits and 2 3-2 since they went public) times what, ~$80/share would be closer to $23K. I bought in about 6-7 years ago, and I'm _not_ complaining! :-)
I don't understand you. What was the point of your post other than to be a joke? It wasn't cute nor was it funny. If you are going to waste our time, at least make it worth our while.
Well, I've always thought of Cisco as a respectable company, who makes respectable products, but when they're compared to Microsoft, one really starts to wonder...
Lerner & Bosack (sp?) left with a bunch of stock. Unfortunately they offloaded it waaayyy too soon.
Microsoft's "innovations" are similar to Linux's "innovations" -- both bring already existing technology down to a lower price point. If you want bleeding edge technology, PC space is not where to find it.
You people are clueless. Whoever posted this article should be shot. CSCO's market cap did pass MSFT's for a few hours yesterday. But on after hours trading at Island(www.isld.com), MSFT ran up to 114 1/2 on news that they proposed a settlement. CSCO last traded at 79 9/16. Thus, MSFT is worth slightly more than CSCO.
Before you post more anti-microsoft fud, you slashdot people should at least do some research. Next time, don't let your lies be exposed by a few mouse clicks. Oh, and don't forget to moderate this post down, even though it's "insightful", "interesting", and the truth.
Dr Kool
One thing about the networking industry is that they are very quick to converge on industry standards. They may introduce their own protocols, but it's either adopted across the industry or forgot about. Interoperability is the key.
Compare this to companies like Microsoft or Netscape, who think they can play embrace and extend game - it's quite different.
"I think cisco makes crappy ass products and deserves to be almost worthless. " This isn't flame bait, it's true. Practically every product is technically inferior to products made by other vendors...ie extreme, alteon,foundry,juniper,lucent etc... all make products that compete directly that are orders of magnitude better wrt performance.
Cisco hasn't shot itself in the foot yet, and I doubt they intend to.
Most companies don't intend or desire to shoot themselves in the feet. Duh.
I know alot of companies that are more valuable than Microsoft.
Are you paying attention? You have another company to illegally persecute....er, prosecute.
Most companies don't intend or desire to shoot themselves in the feet. Duh.
Oh yeah? Someone should have told Netscape. They should have put their heads in the sand and stuck their asses out to be fucked by Microsoft. At least that way Microsoft would have thrown them some scraps. Now they're a fucking "web portal". What a joke.
There is no "expected" in the stock market. If there was, trading would be as easy as programming.
Who is fucking 'tard the moderated this up? It's obvious Troll bait.
Here: I will flame him and make it verified troll bait.
WHAT'S YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM? CISCO RULES BEEATCH!
instantly mod this wannabe troll down as Score -1 stupid fuck
Yeah it was, but I figured, hey, why not give the guy what he wanted? So few people stoop to such blatant troll bait.
It kind of makes me look like a chump, but WTF right?
Cisco's big contribution is driving a stake through the concept of internal R&D being the way a big tech company enters new businesses. The Cisco way to enter a new business is to acquire startups -- the premium they pay for buying the winner is well worth the risk they avoided by trying to create the technology themselves. Notice how Intel consciously copied their approach when Craig Barrett decided it was time to become a silicon networking company.
If you had 5,177,000,000 shares of Microsoft, you would have 100% of MS shares. They can't hide a certain number in secret company vaults. So in essence market capitalization is the current value that a small % of the shares are trading at (as only a small % of a company trades on a normal day), but it includes ALL shares in the company, be they internally held, held by CEOs, or publicly traded. That's per SEC rules. However of course the company could spit out another 5 billion shares if they wanted to, and all the employees could take up their options (up to 10% of the current outstanding MS shares from what I've heard, although I'm not sure about that), etc. However, the one true value of a company is the market capitalization. Of course it's ridiculous to think that you could buy every share without anyone noticing and a price runup occuring, however technically if buying at the market price and somehow 100% of the shares were available, you would have 100% of Microsoft for $57X billion. Cheers!
They make the worlds fastest firewall. Also, they have a clever algorithm for compressing routing tables so small they fit in cache memory, which improves performance a lot, even on standard hardware.
Number three: Cisco has gobbled up every company in an area of weakness and made M&A work. Credit CEO John Chambers and his staff on this one. Cisco has got "the buyout" down to an artform, in fact, executives from other companies come and study it. This ability to quickly integrate companies into Cisco has lead to the EXTREMELY low turnover within companies Cisco has bought out. This number hovers around 2% vs a standard in the industry 30%. Leading to number four.
Number four: Great people make Cisco work. Cisco has been able to recruit, hire, buy, and keep its people allowing it to move quickly. With the use of a good corporate culture and outrageous stock options, Cisco can get the people it needs to keep moving.
----
Next time maybe you could put some original thought some into your post instead of reguritating the front page Wall Street Journal article from about 2 weeks ago. Real original, chump.
Maybe if you spent more time reading crap besides slashdot you'd have a clue about what's going on in the real world.
I'm not sure I'd do that. M$ has a lot of cash, and they like to long their stock, if their price falls they just buy up extra shares. It's how they make some of their money.
So, I dunno if I'd do that.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Bring back the glorious meept!
My Meept, why hast thou forsaken us???
If you're worried about your L box not talking to cisco gear, don't sweat it. Both are *very* standards-based and likely to stay that way. OTOH, cisco got where they are by building good stuff. I'm a long-time linux bigot^H^H^Hadvocate and a long-time cisco customer, and as I see it both have their place. The question becomes: What happens if you get hit by a truck? Your company can find someone to admin the linux solution, but they can find cisco expertise with one phone call (and no, I'm not a PHB -- that's just how a lot of them think).
why go anonymous now, asshole? we already know you're a dumb fuck
READ THE FULL FSCKING ORIGINAL POST! IF YOU DON'T GET IT - DON'T FSCKING FLAME IT!
Heh? Anyone know what the article is talking about?
IAAL,BIANLY
He has a new company called Loudcloud which is getting a lot of positive buzz. I also believe he's overrated, but his name means money to VCs. If you don't like Andreessen, sorry; you will have to go through the pain of seeing him become even richer in a couple of years when Loudcloud has its own IPO or is acquired.
--
BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
Bill Gates is still the most valuable man
..........sig...........
I think cisco makes crappy ass products and deserves to be almost worthless. They should make good networking products like Microsoft, then they could claim that they do something worthwhile.
:P
wait - scratch that...reverse it!!
-FluX
-------------------------
Your Ad Here!
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
So will this OS run only if you have a NIC installed, will it actually change the boot sequence to boot from the NIC card? In order to interface with it, will I be able to use a keyboard or must I have an RJ45 sticking out of my ass?
You can't handle the truth.
quit trolling!!! its illegal!!!
trolling helps improve the quality on slashdot. so troll till your fingers bleed its not like slashdot is gonna get any better.
MODZ: m0D thIs shIt uP!!!
FUCK YOU
shut up u zEalut!!!!
BLOW IT OUT YER FUCKIN ASS!!!
hakensline grebir okstak, xealetro. eka consescus loplint yirot ur psakafag. xealetrey voy uno lokenslite yubro.
A stock ticker would have mentioned it the day it happened, not two days later. A news site, on the other hand... er, nevermind.
I am a sysadmin at a small company in upstate NY. We are about to enter the ASP market where are bandwidth needs will increase significantly. Currently we have our T1s and routing handled by Linux and Sangoma T1 cards, I would like to keep it this way but am concerned with Cisco's overall dominance of the market. Our Sangoma solution is extremely cheaper than going the Cisco route (no pun), and we have had absolutely NO problems with communicating over Frame Relay to our ISP using the Sangoma/Linux boxes. What are your guys thoughts? To give you an idea of the costs we were quoted over 7k for a Cisco/NAT/Firewall capable router setup. I did it myself for under a grand and a discarded Pentium system, and feel more comfortable managing Linux's Masq/IP Chains tools.
So where are the non-cisco implementations of EIGRP?
(yes, I know that we should all be using OSPF instead anyway).
Lemme see if I got this straight: Compaq buys RAM from Micron, somehow certifies it (i.e. sticks a "Compaq" sticker on it, and runs a few diagnostics), and for this charges a 5x markup? And all for what? To amortize the cost of taking the blame away from Micron, even though Micron is still eventually the one to blame?
(well, it was at least 5x for their DEC workstations).
Actually, I also think Cisco has decided to move to QNX for their OS, so if Linux on a router makes sense they could switch to it quite easily.
sigs are a waste of space
The Cisco guys seem to take pride in working with their customers (that is, the END USERS, not the distributors or any other middleman) when there's a problem and fixing it as quickly as possible, even going so far as to patch router OSes to accomodate your particular unusual requirements.
I've used linux boxes as routers and such for low-intensity applications, and they work pretty good... but when I need to push big data reliably, Cisco is the only way to go IMO.
With the majority of other admins I know out there having similar experiences and thinking the same way about Cisco, it's not hard to understand how they can be worth as much or more than MS and still have a good PR rep. Perhaps MS could learn a couple things from Cisco and make their customers happier.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Ya why does Microsoft still think it's a software-only company. I watched the BG interview on Larry King and BG said that Microsoft would never enter the hardware market (or something to that effect), but at that very moment there were Microsoft keyboards and mice on store shelves? Do they have a different definition of "hardware"?
even a mostly clueless network admin will pick their own IOS for their routers, cisco has a habit of installing whatever is their current IOS of the day on whatever you buy. if your network is built using the same routers it would seem to be a good idea to run the same IOS on all of them. cisco can pre-install them for you if you can't be bothered to tftp a new image, but please - you can't blame an outage caused by admin incompitance on cisco pre-loading a buggy software image.
Linux based routers just can not compete with Cisco/Lucent/Nortel(bay) routers since they have almost no usefull network interfaces. How with a linux router can you deal with any large network connections? linux routers work just fine in a handful of situations, hell cabletron switches are much better than cisco switches, but cisco has as much marketshare as they do becouse they have a HUGE productline and they fit almost everyones networking needs. You can build anything from a 56k network to a OC48 sonet system using cisco (and some cerent) equipment. with linux you can build a firewall, a T1 router, a 56k router, and an ethernet router (tho don't try gig-ethernet and expect to push anywhere near 1000mbits)
I love my Sangoma cards. I've got three of them in service now. It takes me longer to get a closed-box router out of the packaging and connected than it does to get a Sangoma based Linux machine going.
Think of OS and Software as cars and roads as the networks. Now which one is more important the cars that allow us to travel on the roads or the roads that allow our cars to move from one place to another?
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
There's a big difference between designing microprocessors and wrapping plastic around rubber balls...
>Linux is the portable OS of all time, and can >scale from a PalmPilot to an AS400. No other >operating system can do that. Umm.. what about NetBSD? >Linux is the first OS to have over 10,000 >developers. Some people may not view thousands of kids as being beneficial to the integrity of a projects source code. Especially when the project lacks a formal code review process in all but the core.
Damn.. forgot the dang thing would munge the text.
As someone who works at cisco, I don't know where you got all your info. Some points:
1) EIGRP etc are patented. True. We don't sue over patents. They are defensive (like when we were sued by Lucent 1-2 years ago) -- not offensive weapons used to prevent entry. Typically if someone has cool technology that they have patented, Cisco will swap patent rights with them. Seems fair to me, we developed a lot of cool stuff over the last decade.
2) Saying IOS is kinda buggy is like saying linux is kinda buggy. That's a big freakin' code base!
And there aren't nearly as many good testers and debuggers out there for IOS as for Linux. But I think you have conceded (and other posters on this thread confirm) that for the most part, IOS works and is pretty stable as long as you aren't doing crazy stuff. Of course, if you find a bug, it probably feels like the biggest bug ever to you, since it probably affects you. Also, we subscribe to release-early, release-often. 5.2.12(4) for release numbers anyone?
3) Your 6-month project restriction comment. I have no idea where you heard that. Totally not true. Maybe that was one particular manager in one particular group. In any case, wouldn't you expect a company to hire a person to do a specific thing? It's not like we just bring you in and let you make things up... there's a plan and a strategy that has be executed on.
4) Not everything runs IOS. Maybe some people don't know this but all the switches run something called CatOS (Catalyst OS). That's not IOS. It's another parallel OS designed for switches (not routers). Similar looking CLI, but different nonetheless.
5) As far as only supporting Cisco equipment, again not true. For our FAEs, the only point is to get the customers network working. There are lots of stories of tech support fixing 3Com/Bay/Ascend/Livingston/Lucent/whatever gear to get the customer up and running. As others have commented, sometimes we don't make a piece of equipment for a specific purpose. We're not going to stop you from buying it, and we're going to support your network.
6) Stomping on companies. Cisco has the advantage of providing the total picture. Cisco will stomp on companies that can provide only part of the picture, simply because they are limited. All these hot terabit-router startups, think about it. If you are UUNet, are you going to stick this router from a company with 100 people in the center of your backbone? Or would you rather have Cisco with 25000 employees, 3 world-wide 24x7 technical support centers, field-swap agreements, etc? What do you think happens?
7) The DOJ. Why break up Cisco? We have to implement the same IEEE 802.3 Ethernet as everyone else... We implement the same T1/E1 signalling. If we don't, it won't work with your ISP/carrier/other business unit/whatever, and the customer will be angry. God forbid that the customer buys the whole kit and kaboodle from Cisco because it's one vendor to deal with who seems to be pretty competent. Oh, the horror!
Cisco is a pretty cool place to work, all in all. I tend to agree with the poster that maybe we don't make the absolute _best_ equipment (or maybe we don't have it _first_), but what we make is pretty damn good, stable, and interoperable. And that is really what matters for most network ops folks. Plus, it's really nice to be able to think that most of the packets you push out to the internet go through something you worked on/built.
does this mean we can stop going Micro$oft and start saying Ci$co?
Actually, Cisco is worth lots because they are one of the few companies that has actually made any real money on the Internet. When people are bidding up the value of wells of red ink, it makes sense to invest in the real revenue stream.
Come to think of it, the Internet as a whole has been totally overblown (to this point) as a profit center. Cisco's made money. Sun has made money. IBM has made money, but it's a fraction of their revenue stream. Same with Oracle. Microsoft has been giving away products just to hold market share. The ISP business is flat, and AOL just essentially divested itself and bought a movie studio. Netscape went under, and the PC hardware people (including Apple) are treading water. Not to mention the millions flushing down the toliets of ecommerce.
The future looks bright, but the present is pretty gloomy (unless you are Cisco or Sun).
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Pretty damn sharp bunch.
Regards,
-BK
Chemical Blog
--
Pohl's Law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.
Wow. What breaking news. IT's what.. Sunday?
Anyone who watches any of the stocks KNOWS that this happened last week. Wow. What great news.
I put all my money into CSCO on Monday, and sold on Friday :P
Weeeee!
Phillip
No, but it would be worth watching. Especially if they started doing closed-source projects.
And what was the hot news posted on WonkoSlice today?
/. !!!
;)
"IDcide provides security while you browse"
Seems like this was post 5 DAYS AGO on
Hmmmm, change is definitely needed.
load "linux",8,1
Measuring the value of the outstanding stock doesn't tell you anything about the company except that people who buy and sell stock think the company is worth buying. That doesn't mean the company is actually growing or doing well, just that a bunch of people think it will be doing better in the future.
Did you notice that the sales of some of the so-called smaller companies dwarfed Cisco? GM, GE, and many other companies are much larger, they just don't have as much outstanding stock.
Also remember that a lot of Internet companies are currently overvalued by the market.
This is essentially a fluff piece.
Bolie IV
I agree with you about this but also does it really matter? You only really care if you own alot of Cisco and want to be richer than some who owns alot of Microsoft.
Besides, what would be bigger news would be when Microsoft passed GE in market cap.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Probably because Fore kit uses NT as an OS!! The last Firm I was working for got me to look at them, and I recommended against it for this reason.
NT as a frickin OS for an infrastruture device, doh!
I guess this means Microsoft is on its way down now, right ? Wrong.
What was this purpose of this article? I was aware of this Friday. I thought this was a news site...not a stock ticker.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
keyboards, mice, joysticks, speakers etc... do NOT constitute hardware. Those are peripherals, things that are external add-ons to your computer to make it more cozy. Hardware would be the things that are inside of the beige box that is sitting next to you (or if you have a Sun or SGI, the purplish-blue/indigo box....Im not here to list every possible color of comptuer cases). Microsoft apparently does have a different definition of hardware.
The X-box could arguable be an example of MS hardware, but I dont believe that they are the OEM of that machine, and besides, it is more of a dumbed down PC, designed to play games than a piece of hardware IMHO.
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Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
I think that is a very geek centric viewpoint to think Cisco is some mysterious company. Almost 50% of Americans have some involvement in the stock market, and Cisco has been one of the 3 highest valued companies for a couple years now. Just a few days ago, my oral surgeon wanted to talk shop about the networking industry after I mentioned I am a system administrator.
matt
AAhhh! Yes, that is what I was talking about. I have not yet been trained in configuring routers and such. I have just been told about the different protocols and market techniques. I was told you could nearly make them plug and play. Ah well, I guess I'll find out when I'm told to set one up:) We should be getting some new cisco routers into the lab for playing around. So.. I should be able to learn then:)
What I refer to as Linux is more than the kernel. When Microsoft talks about Winodws being innovative, they're talking about more than the kernel - they're talking about IIS, Terminal Services, the GUI, Management interface, SMS, and a whole heap more.
It might not be technically correct to refer to typical Linux apps as `Linux', but it's necessary for an apples-to-apples comparision. You can't compare one kernel to one kernel plus a thousand apps
I dont know what they IPO'd for but they are up 94,168% over the last ten years... figure they IPO'd for $25, now it would be $23.5K, thats _sweet_
Mark Duell
But the quote:
"You'll probably see this shift in market cap continue," Cristinziano said referring to Cisco's market capitalisation.
Seemed a little funny to me.
Am I the only one who danced a little jig when reading this?
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I've found that kind of funny, as Cisco have been getting very bad press lately. The London Internet Exchange - the major networking hub in the UK has got totally fed up with them. Story here.
I read it differently. MSFT is overvalued, thus a fortiori investing in AOL is insane.
Although their little slogan says "News for Nerds," I don't think it should be thought of as a traditional news site. It's far more a community for discussion and sharing of information, rather than a breaking story, first with the news place. And honestly, how many of the stories you see here are significantly less relevant even if they get posted 2 or 3 days after they could've been? The technology moves fast in this era, but not that fast.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
EIGRP: Proprietary Cisco routing protocol CGMP: Proprietary Cisco multicast protocol IOS: Buggy piece of do-everything shit. It's like using NetBEUI when everyone is buying microsoft. Yes, we can deal with it. But we have to. We can throw EIGRP over OSPF, but that doesn't mean "it works together;" it means we have to make it work, or nobody buys our stuff.
A difference of $1 billion qualifies as being "slightly ahead,..."
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
You're missing a large part of how value is estimated, which is earnings growth. MSFT doesn't much to grow in their main income streams (OS and office), since they already dominate the market.
On the other hand, Yahoo and Ebay still have plenty of people to reach, more features to add, and more ways to make money.
A quick look through yahoo's stock research shows that the estimate for earnings growth for 2001 vs 2000:
MSFT: 14.47%
AOL: 40.91%
YHOO: 31.83%
EBAY: 82.44%
A simple crude way to estimate valuation for large companies is to compare the long term future earnings growth to the P/E ratio. A properly valued company would have 1 as this value. In comparison, the current S&P 500 is 2.21.
The correct way to calculate value is to look at the assets - debts + all future cash flows, discounted for time. If you have a time machine...
Now we have a replacement for "The Man." Time to drop the MS bashing and start bashing Cisco instead... :)
microsoft did this all the time, but i have yet to hear of a problem with cisco... it seem other companies would complain if they did.
anyone have any insite here?
.sigs are dumb!
Not to start a Anti-MS flame but: .. shall we say.. flaky?
The big difference (that i see) is that while MS is a large monopoly, some of its products are
Cisco makes good stuff..
my $2x10^-2
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
"They have certification programs that are very similar to Microsoft certification programs " With one significant exception - CCIE is one studmuffin of a cert. This is the ONLY cert (maybe ICE?) that's worth a damn (MCSE was always a joke, CNE used to not be a joke but today it is) CCIE's are some of the most knowledgeable/experienced folks I have ever met.
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
"How can they get away with this stuff?" (btw I work for Compaq ;-) )well, lets say we started using generic RAM (it all is nowadays, isn't it?) and we had a problem. If they found out about the "wrong" (in quotes becasue "their" ram is industry standard third party OEM stuff)RAM in it, you'd dislocate your eyeballs watching all the fingerpointing that would ensue, and it would take *2* forevers to get the thing fixed, and only AFTER you pulled the RAM and replaced it with Cisco's. So, if you want your warranty to not get voided or your support contract to become worthless, better use "their" RAM
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Sorry. I'm tired of explaining myself - the original post was meant to be a juxtaposition of MS and Cisco. i.e. - that i thought MS was a shitty company with relatively shitty products, and that Cisco makes damned good products. Unfortunately, it appears that most of the other slashdotters don't have the same taste as i do for verbally ironic posts.
If there is anything true about Cisco, it is probably that they are becoming a company that is taken for granted...I would take a Cisco product over almost any other on the market. Why? because i've seen alot of shit break - and Cisco products probably break the least. we just had a situation where an entire subnet puked because of a single Extreme switch (no, not bad hardware, but that's another post for another time). Another in which a firewall we installed hosed alot of stuff. I personally feel that Cisco makes damned reliable products. and in a production environment, that's what counts.
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I figured i might possible get flamed for this post. Unfortunately it was after i hit the submit button. If you're going to flame me, don't do it for hating Cisco - if you do...you're just proving either your own illiteracy or your fanatical zealotry and inability to complete the reading of a three sentance post. It's like flaming someone for posting "Unix is the worst type of operating system...except for all the others."
Oh well...i guess we all have to be fanatical about something. does someone have a match?
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
yah - i was fucking around. did you read the end of the post?
Oh well...it was a lame ass comment anyway.
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
The guys who wrote the article have come up with a nice way to make statistics... just notice, every percentage in the article reads like:
Company owns 80% of market.
And thinking that all I had to do in those statistics classes was putting 80% in every result and I would have made it the first time!
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Marcelo Vanzin
Marcelo Vanzin
i don't seem to recall them making anything particularly novel.
do they own the rights to routing technology or something?
isn't this the company that threw out their founder in a massive pissing match in the mid-nineties? i think he and his wife got a few million dollars or something...that's quite a deviation from the microsoft situation, eh?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
This is just an example of patent monopolies overtaking copyright monopolies. Either way, the end consumer is screwed out of having a choice in the technologies they deal with. Patent monopolies are shorter term, but can not be legally reverse engineered. So don't be supprised if there will be great pressure to make patents last longer.
Why is stock informaation always presented in fraction form? I mean, 1/16th, that's like 6.25 cents or somthing. Why dosn't the stock market just use decimal numbers like everyone else?
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
I'm not sure, but as far as I know, other companies, such as Alcatel with its acquisitions, hold a significanty share or the interconnecting market, at least outside of the US. And I also think Alcatel is number one of ADSL, at least in Europe.
Once again, I'm not sure. If somebody has actual numbers...
The two founders of Cisco (then married) sold their stock after being fired for a reported $235 million. Not bad of course. Figure $100/mil each and then $50/mil after taxes.
:>
After you reach several million, isn't it all just the same? I don't know, but I'd sure like to find out.
I heard from somewhere that one share of Cisco stock bought the day after it's IPO would be worth $7000 today. That's pretty incredible.
I find pipes, routers (and switches) _very_ sexy!
:-)
I do agree, though, that most people are fairly uniformed (and therefore not turned on) about network infrastructure.
they could merge and become CiscoSoft, the first $1 trillion company ever...but then again, if microsoft ran all the servers, most of the internet would eventually crash, and they'd probably go broke.. kinda defeats the purpose, i guess. -mm-
-sneakyian, President, Lamer Euthanization Services, Inc. "Putting you out of our misery since 1973"
However, cisco may need to worry about losing market share to linux:
linux-router.org
cyclades
sangoma
I probably wouldn't use linux as a router everywhere, but it certainly makes sense in some situations. I would guess that competition from linux based routers will cause Cisco to lower the prices on their hardware, at least somewhat.
This is interesting. Cisco appears to be making a strong push into all segments of networking hardware. Most notably (from my experience) the access router market, competing with RedBack to be the access concentrator solution for emerging CLECS and broadband providers. Now the real question is will Cisco be innovative or just buy the technologies they want, and how much worse can their Sales Engineers get?
./bot
Cisco may overtake Microsoft as the most valuable company, but when it comes to global influence and branding, Cisco stay lags far behind. I hear that among the younger generation in China, "Microsoft" is spoken almost like an everyday vocabulary, with everyone striving to be the next Bill Gates. Amazing how far a well-oiled marketing machine can do.
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Just a little note - The Market Cap is not synonymous with the value of the business. Only a certain portion of the business is out there on the market. If I gave somebody a buck for all of a candybar and someone else bought half of one for 75 cents, guess which candy bar is worth more? I'm not sure if Cisco or Microsoft has put a larger share of the company on the market, but it would be easy enough to find out. My guess is that Microsoft has a smaller % in the public control. Don't forget, if you wanted to buy all of Microsoft, you would have to buy Bill's chunk too. g.
Well, imagine this: Say, one day, Yahoo goes "off the air" for three hours. The techs track it down to a router that had a flaky SIMM module. The flaky RAM module was put in by the manufacturer, who wanted to offer a low-cost product.
... it just isn't worth the risk.
... a different set of values really do apply in these business-critical equipment purchases.
That won't happen with Cisco hardware, or Sun hardware, or Network Appliance hardware, or equipment from any similar high-quality manufacturer.
You see, the high-quality vendors qualify every component that goes into the system: every fan, connector, SIMM, disk drive, power supply, and even the on/off switch.
They run these machines in special ovens, to test the overheating margins, in case a fan fails or the units are packed too tightly in the customer's rack or the air-conditioning fails. They check and recheck firmware revs, driver versions, and every software component as well.
The goal is a bulletproof system that will run for years. And that is what you want, if you are Yahoo or Ebay or Charles Schwab.
Customers are generally willing to pay the price for quality and reliability. Sure, the same disk drive may be available down at Fry's for one third the price. But if you buy it from Fry's, and it fails, the system vendor's guarantee doesn't apply. The disk drive that you bought at Fry's might have a different firmware level. Or maybe somebody returned that drive to Fry's and they repackaged it without noticing that the first buyer had bent one of the connector pins.
I buy a lot of my personal hardware from friends, or from discount shops. But for business? never
I hope this helps
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Pretty much every hardware company does this. I priced out 1GB of Compaq RAM for one of their fancy servers, and it was $ 7,800. VA Research charged me $ 2,400 for the same stuff when I bought it with their FullOn rack system.
The only thing I wonder is, "How can they get away with this stuff?" And, if there is some reason or another to use their RAM, why isn't it creating obscene profits for the companies involved? Last time I heard, neither Compaq nor Cisco had 600% profit margins. Where does this 600% gross profit go?
D
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Most of your examples are either:
a) Not true technological innovations (e.g., more incidental)
b) Not Linux Innovations (e.g., linux just adopted)
a) Simply not part of Linux. (e.g., Apache)
Ok, calling this innovation is a bit of a stretch, since it was more incidental than anything else. But in either case, Linux was not the first. You may be too new to Unix to recognize this, but there were other free operating systems around for x86 well before Linux.(e.g., fbsd)
There is disagreement over this fact, BSDs have been ported to a number of other platforms as well. The only difference is that Linux has a thousand more geek/fans who try to do such things, though how this helps most consumers is beyond me. I've been running Linux for about 5 years now, and the only other platform i'd consider running on is Alpha.
VNC != Linux. VNC was developed by a commercial company, which was later open sourced. Also, VNC was far from the first graphical remote administration tool, about the only pertinent difference that I can think of is that it is client-stateless (which, incidently, isnt' new to PC, only for Unix)
...many of which are not a core part of Linux. All of which Linux did not invent, or employ in particularly innovative ways.
So what? No matter what platform you develop for, that platform is going to be your "first" platform--that is not innovation. Also, MS can make the same claims with all of their major OSs.
This is hardly significant. IA64 is not exactly available yet. Being the "first" in this case is hardly significant because it's not the result of some technological hurdle, rather it's a race (if others really care) in which linux just happened to complete a few minutes before (e.g., Linux early finish hasn't lead the way for others by any means). I'm sure Linux's early finish is mostly due to the kernel's relatively miniscule size, though, what about all the other things which people demand in an OS. They'd hardly thank MS if they just ported their kernel, but nothing else. Furthermore, is being the "first" to port to a processor that is not yet available truely important? The question should be, who has the most effective OS (complete solution, as opposed to just kernel) when IA64 becomes widely available.
No, it was not. BSDs come to mind, amongst others. Speaking of databases, why is it that Linux doesn't have a single high quality open source/free database that can support transactions, procedural language, triggers, and the like? Hint: MySQL doesn't meet this criteria, despite it's other nice features for certain application.
I highly doubt that Linux routers will make a noticable impact in Cisco's success. First off, in the vast majority of cases, routers are best left to embedded systems--there is no compelling reason to run a full blown operating systems, when all you need is a NOS. Secondly, in the few cases in which embedded solutions aren't appropriate, Cisco probably never had their attention anyways. Thirdly, "linux routers" have been around for a couple years now, there is no likely reason for anything to change from Cisco's hand to Linux routers'.
That being said, Cisco is overvalued. Although Cisco will likely continue to grow and retain their market share, they're unlikely to grow at a rate that can justify a market capitalization of 500 billion.
GE, at $522.3 Billion. Now, GE is a conglomerate in just about every industry there is... I wonder if THAT'S a good thing vs. dominance in just one.
Rent a Penske truck? You're paying GE. Aetna Health Insurance? Yep. NBC? Uh huh.
However, I'd also note that Cisco also blew away most of their competition in the early 90s, such as Ascend, Bay et cetera. Sure, most of them are still around, but not in any real quantities to challenge Cicso.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
Actually, I think he was thinking of CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol) But, I can tell you that it makes Cisco routers FAR from plug-n-play. It simply allows Cisco routers to "see" each other across a working physical layer. If you plug two Cisco routers together acorss a corssover cable, and bring up the interfaces, they will see each other. At that point, everything still needs to be configured by hand. It simply allows you to see that everything is cool in the physical end.
Basicly, if you configure routers, and they don't talk, but they can see each other via CDP, you know its your configuration and not the equipment or the connection.
Plug-n-play, God, I wish.
--knick
Not really. Interested fact, even thought Cisco is the 500 pound gorilla of the networking market, Microsofts network is mostly Fore Systems based (now a Marconi company). Big people in the ATM market (which Cisco has NOT been known to be a real winner in till the past few years. Bay Networks/Nortel was really struggling in this market till they were bought by Nortel)
Cisco is a monopoly? Well.. if everyone DOES use cisco hardware. The difference between Cisco and MS is the reasons WHY they use cisco hardware.
Building a network out of cisco equipemnt (and yes, I've built many), nothing prevents you from using competitors equipment mixed in with it. NOTHING. Cisco is completely open about their protocols and standards. Cisco gear WORKS.
I have never had cisco break interoperability, in fact, I find their routers and switches MORE flexible and configurable than anyone elses.
And no, I don't work for Cisco.
Can you cite some examples of cisco breaking interoperability? As far as I can tell, cisco has always been forthcoming with their standards. They succeed because their products rock.
Even the allmighty LINUX cannot hold a candle to cisco when it comes to internetworking. Sorry.
As someone who worked for a start-up which made a product to augment Cisco equipment, I can honestly say that they are indeed a monopoly and their practices are often just as bad as Microsoft's. Cisco has totally locked up the enterprise networking market. Cisco uses proprietary protocols and prevents other companies from being compatible through patent protection. Protocols such as EIGRP, IGRP, and even PAgP are protected by patents, making interoperability by third parties impossible.
For example, at the start-up I worked at (which was recently aquired), we made a router accelerator. This box required zero configuration and could sit in front of any router and offload all of the local traffic, switching it at wire speed. The neat part was that our box required zero configuration, just plug it in. Unfortunately, marketing was targeting the enterprise. No matter what we did we could not make headway. The problem was that often the customer would then ask Cisco about compatibility, to which Cisco would say something like "We don't know", which would immediately kill the sale. Our product was a fraction the price of the Cisco solution, and it required far less configuration time and better performance than the equivelent Cisco solution, but we couldn't sell it.
All the other networking companies have basically abandoned the enterprise market to Cisco. Nortel and Lucent are out of the enterprise networking market. They are now fighting for the telco and ISP side of the business, where Cisco does not yet have a monopoly.
I would not be surprised if after Microsoft is settled, the government looks into Cisco. I have no qualms about the government breaking up Cisco (after all, Cisco is nothing but a bunch of aquired companies since Cisco rarely invents something in-house).
What does Cisco do right? They have excellent marketing and they have excellent support.
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As someone who has been in the networking area for a while (designing router accelerator software, BRAS software, etc.) I can tell you that Cisco is just as bad as Microsoft.
Cisco uses proprietary protocols and has patents protecting them. For example, EIGRP, a popular enterprise routing protocol, is Cisco proprietary and covered by a patent. Likewise, Cisco's Fast Etherchannel protocol, PAgP (Port Aggregation Protocol) is also patented. Since Cisco basically owns the enterprise market, it is impossible for anyone else to gain entrance, since there is no way they can interoperate with Cisco.
Cisco makes good stuff, not great. IOS is klugy and somewhat buggy from some of the developers who've worked on it have told me. Cisco got where they are not so much through innovation as through purchasing any company that has a product that they don't have.
In the Internet side, people are wary of using non-Cisco routers due to the finikyness of BGP. Cisco routers talk well with Cisco routers. Other routers can be questionable. The only reason Juniper is doing so well is that a bunch of people who worked on Cisco's BGP also wrote Juniper's BGP.
Cisco isn't everywhere. They can't compete with Redback very well, and many parts of the Internet are not dominated by Cisco because they cannot keep up.
While Cisco has many great engineers (of whom I know a number), their management is somewhat restrictive. For example, if you join Cisco, you are assigned your project for the first 6 months with no chance of working on what you want to do (or where your talent can best be appreciated). This is why start-ups often run circles around Cisco, only to be aquired by Cisco when they decide they need the technology.
Cisco moves slowly due to IOS. Everything gets integrated into IOS. That way if they want a product with certain features, they just choose those features from the source tree. While this integration may sound nice, it makes maintanance difficult and adding new features difficult. Start-ups usually start with a clean slate (i.e. VxWorks) and don't have to worry about a bunch of baggage and can focus only on their ideas without worrying about breaking something else.
Cisco is also known for their excellent support. Like IBM of old, though, they will only support Cisco equipment, providing a strong incintive to not use non-Cisco equipment in the network. Like IBM of old, though, you also pay for Cisco. Cisco equipment is not cheap, often costing 2-5 times as much as the competition, but because of the above they can still maintain an 85-90% market share.
Cisco also plays hardball like Microsoft, you just don't hear about it because the end user doesn't see past his modem. Nobody sees the companies that Cisco stomps on.
I suspect it won't be too long until the DOJ turns their eyes towards Cisco. Unlike breaking up Microsoft, breaking up Cisco would not be that big a deal since Cisco is nothing but a bunch of smaller companies that were aquired for their technology. Like putting together puzzle pieces, it isn't difficult to separate the puzzle into pieces later.
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While M$ tweaks file formats on a regular basis to thwart compatibility with other packages, cisco's very founding was to provide interoperability among disparate networks. When they acquire a company, it's to get the technology, not to snuff them out. This "monopoly" doesn't worry me a bit!
If Microsoft keeps getting legal heat, their stock price will remain stagnant.
MS stock was on a run Friday, based on a USA Today article that indicated a settlement could emerge over the weekend based on a new proposal MS was submitting Friday.
The Justice has soundly rejected that offer as not going any way near far enough. As a result expect MS to drop as much as 10% (which will also pull the DOW down quite a bit).
Judge Jackson is now expected to issue his rulling as early as Tuesday, and everyone is expecting a finding that MS violated the anti-trust act.
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Damn damn damn I hate how stupid these analysis are sometimes. "Cisco's operating system will be the platform of the future"....NO! The network will be the platform of the future. Cisco has NO O/S ambitions, and I wish those analysits would understand that.
IOS is an embedded operating system designed to run routers and little else. You can't run Apache on it. You can't run MS Office on it. You can't run thin clients on it. That's not the point. The point is to run a router. Cisco is a hardware company, not a software firm. If you don't know IOS is there, it's doing it's job.
...that makes Bill Gate's share of microsoft ALONE worth around $133,000,000,000. Never mind anything else he owns.
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Matt Singerman
Matt Singerman
http://matt.vegan.net/
In today's market Microsoft stock is severely undervalued. In a situation where other companies like Yahoo(194) and eBay(243) that have a higher debt load, substantially less income and yet have higher share prices is unfathomable. Fortune had a cover issue where they examined the rivalry between AOL and MSFT they broke but companies down this way.
MSFT: Revenues $ 21 billion, net income $8.7 billion, cash & cash equivalents $13.3 billion and no long term debts.
AOL: Revenues $32.8 billion, net income $2.4 billion, $3.7 billion and a long term debt load of $19.8 billion.
The point of the above comparisons is to show that, with regards to most other tech companies Microsoft is extremely undervalued and brings immense return to investors. There is a dark cloud of uncertainty over the company especially with the DOJ verdict expected sometime this week but once this is over, expect Microsoft's market value to reflect it's worth as a company. Either way after the company is split up into mini-Bills or they are forced to release source code or divest IE from Windows the company the company's market value will rise. For those who think this news spells the end of MSFT need to look at the big picture and remember that few tech companies, if any are making as much profit or have as much cash as MSFT.
PS: I am surprised by the amount of ignorance about the Tech Industry (CSCO's IOS is a Linux competitor?!? that most slashdotters are showing from their posts. It seems that if it isn't Linux or MSFT related some of us truly have our heads in the sand. This is a very sad and dangerous practice...
What if suddenly, one particular brand of Linux took over at 90% of the world's computers. Suddenly everyone used this brand of linux.. it would be a monopoly.
But would it be bad just because of that?
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It is not obvious to me whether or not the monopoly is harmfull in this case. Cisco, I understand, actually makes good products. But is that any consolation when they can lock out competition, charge arbitrary prices, and in the future stop making good products because, like MS, they don't _need_ to make good products, just new ones. As of yet most of this hasn't come to pass, but it is a possibility as it is with any monopoly.
.. you guessed it .. Cisco equipment.
Cisco has several protocols that have Monopoly-Abuse potential. All of their switches talk to each other with ISL, proprietary to Cisco, and difficult to integrate with other brands of switch. (Although they do support an open standard as well)
WCCP v2 is copyrighted by Cisco, and only available for their caching hardware and routers, so you can't use any of the cool transparent proxy features of it with squid.
Cisco Discovery protocol is only used for
Sometimes bugs in Cisco software cause pain for other brands because "everyone else has no problems" connecting their Cisco gear to Cisco gear that works on a Cisco tweaked version of the standard. There are plenty of other areas in Cisco that make it incompatable with other vendors, but some of these features are useful things (like BGP community strings) that other brands simply need to catch up on.
Cisco may be a monopoly by market share. But they've done so pissing a lot less people off than Microsoft.
Cisco is open with how their product works. Cisco products generally works with their competitions products and when it doesn't it's because their competitor's products are broken. Quite a few companies I've worked at have tried to replace Ciscos with competitors products and most have failed. Cisco has a nice product line overall. Carefull, ocassionally they buy a competitor and sell a product under there name that does not hold up to my opinion of Cisco quality.
The number one reason I've seen competitors products fail is that they don't do buffering nearly as well as Ciscos. Ciscos have nice buffers.
Though, if you've seen the code for Cisco IOS you begin to think it's a miracle that it works at all! Although, I could say that about the code I've seen for many high quality products (let's push all the registers onto the stack. Again, and oh heh, why not one more time in a different order. Function call. Let's pull off the stack, how many times, in what order? - That wasn't from Ciscos.)
Cisco is a big company but it is rare to find people pissed off at them. Overall the people I've known who work there are also quite happy with the company. I guess they have to be, otherwise more people would be successful at stealing Cisco employees which are in high demand.
Cisco overall does a good job of training its employees.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
True, Cisco does have a huge monopoly, and does use it to increase their sales. My experience is that EVERY net hardware company tries to leverage every edge they have got. It is a very competitive market.
;). However, most routing equipment (including Cisco's) also supports IGRP, which functions much the same way, but is less robust in some aspects. NONE of this is plug n play, BTW. You are still given multiple opportunities to destroy equipment and fsck-up networks through ignorance.
As for Cisco's protocols, I believe that you are referring to EIGRP, which is an extension of IGRP. This does not mean that either is enabled by default, though. Both are very easy to set up. The EIGRP, however, is not a closed protocol, but is not implemented by other vendors because it is not an accepted standard (oh, something with Cisco creating it, I think
This does not prevent anyone from entering into the arena...Foundry, Alteon, Extreme, Juniper, Lucent, 3Com, Bay, F5 Labs, and others are ALL gaining market share of the ever expanding 'net. And ALL of them are more than willing to buy your Cisco equipment and replace it with their *generally* less expensive equipment. Exodus Communications went over to Foundry in that fashion (this is not insider stuff, they announced it).
Interoperability is the only issue at that point.
The problem with ALL of the vendors is that sometimes they have their own interpretation of even the basic standards of a protocol for implementation. This does not mean that it is deliberate, but it can cause problems that have to be resolved by possibly weeks of sitting on the phone with staff from both sides and working out a fix (and, yes, Cisco and the others WILL do this, just not that often). I think most of these companies realize that lack of interoperability of internetworking equipment is bad, and to try and fix known issues.
As for feature sets of the IOS, I can say that most other vendors go out of their way to copy it- being that it is based on a VERY unix-like shell interface. This is one of the big reasons why Cisco jumped ahead of the pack. The other reason was that they moved to cover EVERY segment of the market before everyone else, and combined the two events with an inexpensive, easy to use and fully supported entry-level product. This is a springboard into their larger systems which use the same interface and most of the commands. Essentially, their entire marketbase is easy for a new netadmin to enter and quickly ramp up in terms of knowledge and skills. Its a reciprocal arrangement which I have not seen their competitors reproduce, in spite of many of them having better product.
My only issues with Cisco are the quality of their support (which sucks unlesss you can intimidate their TAC into transferring you to someone clueful) and their bugs- the 11.x syslog bug was a doozy; the PIX ftp security bug isn't quite as bad, but there; other intraoperability bugs that I have found but are not yet documented are also serious. This does not mean other vendors don't have issues, but Cisco seems to have more of them (Foundry had a nmap scan crash bug, also nasty). I think the bottom line is that Cisco made itself into the baseline standard across the board. If you can become the overall baseline standard, it is easier to grow market share without having to excel in any one area.
'Hail Eris, baby, hail Eris...pfffffffttt.' *cough* 'Yeah.'
There are a number of other hardware companies that may eclipse Microsoft in the near future: Intel, NTT Docomo and Nokia. Granted, the value of the latter two is only about half of that of Microsoft.. but if the growth rate of the companies remains the same (for example, both Cisco and Nokia grew 1200% in the last 3 years, whereas Microsoft grew "only" less than 400%), the shift will happen.
Actually, the internet comes from Windows. Didn't you know that??? Duh. In fact, Windows 98 includes Internet version 5.
If you don't believe me, then go here and find out for yourself.
See, users with Windows 98, and I'm assuming 2000, don't need routers, phone lines, ethernet, modems, or any of that mess. Just get some of that power out of the wall, and watch it go.
In the mid-90s, prognostication went along the lines that hardware makers, in a commodity business, were on the way out. It was important to "own the OS". However, with the success of open source (Linux/BSD/Darwin), enabled no doubt by the internet, the landscape has changed to hardware and service being the foci of promise. Can anyone say: IBM stinks? Right: I believe Microsoft stinks (in the long term...but that's why they are building PCs called X-box).
Cisco is a monopoly as huge as Microsoft. Fewer people are aware, because it involves the 'invisible' part of computer usage that most of us take for granted. But because of their market share, Cisco can and does gleefully break interoperability. Their machines don't need to work with anyone else's machines. But if you aren't Cisco, your machines had damn well better work with Cisco's, or you won't have any customers.
This is an interesting comment that is true.   Although where I work has gone for the "cheaper" 3COM router solution, most everywhere has forked up the $$$ to buy Cisco products.
It is not obvious to me whether or not the monopoly is harmfull in this case. Cisco, I understand, actually makes good products. But is that any consolation when they can lock out competition, charge arbitrary prices, and in the future stop making good products because, like MS, they don't _need_ to make good products, just new ones. As of yet most of this hasn't come to pass, but it is a possibility as it is with any monopoly.
I think the issue alot of us (and Judge Jackson) had with Microsoft as a monopoly was not so much its marketshare (which it's had for some time on the desktop) but its business practices.   And this included forcing the "bundling" of their software on every PC sold (although for awhile, there wasn't much choice other than OS/2 or maybe Be or some of the smaller OSs), blah, blah, I think everyone by now knows the story.
If Cisco shows it has its marketshare based on a quality (albeit expensive) product and people buy it, then what can you say?
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Cisco is a monopoly as huge as Microsoft. Fewer people are aware, because it involves the 'invisible' part of computer usage that most of us take for granted. But because of their market share, Cisco can and does gleefully break interoperability. Their machines don't need to work with anyone else's machines. But if you aren't Cisco, your machines had damn well better work with Cisco's, or you won't have any customers.
It's not uncommon for monopolies to exist in infrastructure environments (take the phone company, the electric company, the water system, the cable company, the list goes on, at least in the US). This is because those organizations tend to deal in a highly standardized environment where it pays if everyone's working on the same sheet. I would honestly hate to have more than one or two companies managing the power grid in my city. The possibilities for some sort of mishap increase, as does the cost as each company has to maintain its own network.
With that said, Cisco happens to have a good grip on the hardware implementation of one of these infrastructures and what's keeping them there is a) an excellent product, b) good marketing and c) interrelated systems. However, Cisco would have a hard time locking people out of the router business with changes in their product. They're still dealing in standard protocols when communicating between machines. Cisco routers will work just fine with 3Com Total Control units and hubs because nothing special is happening with the data. When the machines work in parallel, yes you want them to be the same and intercommunicate, but Cisco doesn't need to do anything to lock people out because you generally don't want many different setups doing the same task anyway (look at the pain in the ass handling both K56 and x2 was). The fact that Cisco makes a superior product is primarily what keeps it in control. You can bet, though, that if their work started becoming shoddy, ISPs would jump ship to the next best alternative, and they can because of those common protocols.
IOS is quite copyrighted, and if Cisco thought Juniper or Redback used any IOS code they would sue in half a heartbeat.
IOS's "look and feel" isn't copyrighted. Which is good, since it is pretty much the TENEX LnF anyway. Juniper made their product have a similar LnF because the coustmer base allready has Cisco experiance, and maybe because many of the original Juniper folks were ex-Cisco folks. Redback did the same LnF because they figured the customers would expect it. Redback also added "virtual routers", which they are very proud of.
Cisco has gone and done their own Frame-Relay like Framing ("Cisco HDLC"), their own ethernet VLAN stuff. But I don't beleve it was done for "embrace and extend" reasons. Their VLAN stuff was out before 801.Q was a standard. Their HDLC is much lighter weight then Frame Relay.
But it's not all rosey. They have patented their "Hot Swap IP address" thing (I forget if it is two machines that share a ether MAC, or if they both have a MAC and the third MAC is passed between them). That's right patented.
Cisco has left Juniper in the "super fast super dense router niche" because they can't dislodge them. I don't know if that is because they see selling an ISP-only router (few non-nationwide ISPs need an M40 let alone an M160), or if the BFR really is the best they could do.
Similar with Redback, they just didn't have a product that worked as well in that space last year, and I don't know how hard they are trying.
Now both of these things may be sound bisness moves. Being the biggest-baddest-router is a lot like being a SuperComputer, and you will note few SuperComputer componies make the really big bucks. There is much more money in selling PCs, or even "wussy little Unix things like the Sun E10K".
>Is it because Cisco doesn't live by "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"?
No, it's because pipes aren't glamorous and routers aren't sexy. Everyone who uses a computer has seen Windows; it's always right there in your face. As a result, MS is a household word. On the other hand, most people don't have a clue how data gets from A to B. Come on, some people still think electricity just comes out of the wall.
Cisco is worth lots because they're BIG. They have a set of TV ads on the go right now with a tagline something like 'almost all Internet traffic travels over a Cisco product at one point or another'. Anything Internet is a huge growth industry, and as their propaganda will tell you, they're "the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet".
They're low profile because the end user doesn't give a damn; the Internet just comes out of the wall and into their computer.
Drinking will help us plan!
As I recently began working for a company that does a lot of networking diagnosis, implementing, whatnot, I have began to realize that Cisco has a huge monopoly and DOES use it to increase their sales. Only instead of breaking everyone elses protocols, they just make their protocols "plug and play" if you will. You plug them into a network, they automagically talk with the other routers to setup routes. I forget the name of the exact protocol it uses; however, it is properiety. By closing that protocol no one else can enter cisco arena. So, you have a network built with cisco routers, are you going configure the whole thing to use a open protocol that is not plug 'n' play just to get a cheaper 3com router? It's going to have be WAY cheaper.
Ian
and I mean a TON of them (literally thousands) I can tell you a few things. * They make pretty good stuff * They have no qualms about yanking the carpet out from under you future support-wise (i.e. totally dropping an architecture thus necessitating a sooner than expected hardware upgrade) * They WAY overprice commodity stuff. For instance, when we did some wide-ranging "Y2K" upgrades reccomended by them, I took my $600.00usd Cisco 64MB DRAM DIMM and stuck it in my workstation - worked fine. I then did the opposite, fine as well. * They seem to be EOL (end-of-life) happy. Just when a model starts getting established in our network (as big as it is it takes a while) they will start the EOL process on the friggin thing. * They have EXCELLENT uptime. I can't ever think of one of these (despite literally being a computer/OS) hanging, and we have some of these (those in locations not requiring following their dizzying upgrade path) with uptimes measured in _years_. The ones with uptimes NOT measured in years are that way through no fault of Cisco's (well, I guess "technical" fault is better. When you had to upgrade the thing because they EOL'ed that model, that's sort of their fault, right?) Summary: good stuff, expensive stuff ($600.00 for a $100.00 DIMM sucks)
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
I must say this about cisco, they have "the customer is always right" tatooed on every free part of their collective bodies.
At work, we recently purchased a cisco 1605 router with built in csu/dsu. It was my job to setup and configure this router. The docs weren't as helpful as they could've been, so I put in a call to their tech support. After a lengthy conversation with some one there, I recived a fax with sample configurations, emails with specific technical docs attatched, and just tons of new information. When I finally hung up with the support tech, I checked my voice mail b/c someone had called while I was on the phone (almost an hour), only to find that it was another cisco tech. Apparently, while I was talking to the first tech, my ticket had been entered into the computer with a status of "pending". Seeing this still open ticket, the other tech wanted to make sure that I had recieved _all_ the information I needed to get their product up and running to my complete satisfaction!
This is phenomenal(sp?). Not only do their techs want to stay on the phone with me until I'm completely satisfied (and bearing my "stupid" questions), but they also have techs who "patrol" for open tickets (freshly opened mind you, I was still on the phone with the tech that opened it) who call me to make sure I get everything I can.
I'm no financial expert (taxes...? what are those?) but in my opinion, this company is worth _every_ damned penny of it's valuation.
go cisco, well earned.
from a (very) happy customer,
-Peter
I don't think people understand exactly how much control Cisco has over the Internet. Not only do they make routers, they also make dial-in equipment as well as the OS which runs all this equipment. What's so great about that, you might ask? Well, it's completely possible (and in fact, it's a reality) that an ISP can have 85% of their network infrastructure be Cisco products. It's something they've been able to do very quietly because a) they don't interact with the common consumer the way that MS does and b) they have a reputation for both making solid products and backing them up with solid service. They have certification programs that are very similar to Microsoft certification programs and they maintain a pretty constant flow of OS revisions for their routers. They're not without their problems, though, one of which is to have nasty bugs (when they do have bugs) that are hard to track down. Still, they are a solid company (worth almost $600 billion, I dunno about).
A couple of years ago, my dad, who's a stock market junkie in his retirement, asked me which stocks were the best to buy. He was thinking of stocks like Yahoo, Amazon, etc. and I steered him towards more product driven companies, especially those involved with the infrastructure of the Internet, those that are less visible in the news. It's paid off. Luckily, he manages my portfolio as well. Stocks of companies that provide primarily services (Yahoo, Netpliance, Redhat) are traditionally more volatile than their product counterparts. I think anyone who's made an investment in such companies has generally done pretty well and had a much better chance for growth. This is, of course, long-term advice, not short-term advice. Yes, if you were in on Redhat in the initial period, you made a lot of money, but I wouldn't want to be my kids' future on companies that produce very little tangible product.
And to those worried about Cisco's OS, don't worry, Linux isn't going to be challenged anytime soon. The OS is made for administering routers, not for running games and what-not. It's very specific to its task and not exactly something you play around with.
Cisco is a monopoly as huge as Microsoft. Fewer people are aware, because it involves the 'invisible' part of computer usage that most of us take for granted. But because of their market share, Cisco can and does gleefully break interoperability. Their machines don't need to work with anyone else's machines. But if you aren't Cisco, your machines had damn well better work with Cisco's, or you won't have any customers.
It is not obvious to me whether or not the monopoly is harmfull in this case. Cisco, I understand, actually makes good products. But is that any consolation when they can lock out competition, charge arbitrary prices, and in the future stop making good products because, like MS, they don't _need_ to make good products, just new ones. As of yet most of this hasn't come to pass, but it is a possibility as it is with any monopoly.
Perhaps, being networking where people are generally educated and care about performance, this will take care of itself, and no problem will emerge. But in the end PHB's still make the decisions, which worries me. I guess I just can't see a company get that huge with that much market share and not shudder a little.
The enemies of Democracy are
The other thing about networking equipment, it has to obey the protocol. Cisco hasn't gone out and written it's own version of IP, frame relay, or ATM that is going to fsck someone putting equipment from multiple vendors on the same network or force certain hardware. Juniper routers can be put into an ISP's network, as can Redback aggregates, and still talk to the cisco border and transfer routers. UUNet uses equipment from all three vendors in mass quantities.
Cisco hasn't shot itself in the foot yet, and I doubt they intend to. In contrast to Microsoft, Cisco has become the networking giant because their products actually work. Redback and Juniper have come into the game in niche positions, and Cisco has left them there, rather than trying to kill them off.
--mandi