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Unwinding Cisco's Not-So-Simple Beginnings
saridder writes: "There's a saying that behind every fortune is a crime, and
as we have learned with Apple, Microsoft, and others, Cisco is no
different. The SJ Mercury
has an article outlining and debunking the myth of Cisco's
founding."
Hey look, Yet More Proof (tm):
...
Bickering, fighting, and arguing (er, I mean, competition) between intelligent grownups DOES lead to people making millions!
Well, there it is. I guess I havn't anything left to complain about
"Old man yells at systemd"
most startup stories are sensationalized. "Two people started Cisco in their living room" sounds better than "after fighting Stanford for rights to technology and with the aid of a team of geeks, Cisco was born". Same with Jobs and Wozniak. the whole "Apple IIe invented in their garage" sound much better than "Wozniak was working for HP at the time and did most of the work at his desk". People like to hear stories about total nobodies who lived the ultimate American dream, that's all. I use Cisco because they make a good product, not because of their sensational "against all odds" story.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Back in 1986 the first router company sent a vice president to California to check out some companies there as canidates for a buy out. After much thought the executive decided that Cisco was going nowhere, and they bought a slightly larger router company down the street from Cisco.
Long timers at Network System belive that if the executive had decided to buy Cisco instead of the other company, you wouldn't have heard of Cisco today, instead that other company would have been dominate. How things change, Network Systems no longer makes routers, having realised that Cisco won the market long ago.
I'm very happy about cisco's success. But none the less, Stanford recieves a huge amount of public money - and the intellectual property that Cisco has should rightly belong to the public domain.
I really have no objection of them using it, or being successfull becaus of it, but locking everyone else out is what I really have a problem with. (especially since I probably paid for it)
Oh hardly.
Disclaimer: I'm a Stanford alum and sometime-studier of silicon valley lore.
MIT's spinoff list is all well and good but if you add up Stanford's it'd eat them alive:
Hewlett-Packard, SGI, Sun, Cisco (regardless of what you believe from this story), Yahoo, Intuit, IDEO just for starters. You could even probably find a way to argue Intel (as an offspring of Fairchild, which settled in SV because of Bob Noyce, and probably indirectly because of Fred Terman and David Starr Jordan), but it'd be a stretch.
Fred Terman was the Dean of the Engineering school when Hewlett and Packard were at Stanford, he was their mentor and encouraged them strongly to start a company. It's well-documented.
Stanford has been highly entwined with the venture capital community in silicon valley since the 70's (perhaps even earlier, I can't be definitive). If you wander around the campus you can see the synergy just in the names on the buildings (Gates, Allen, Hewlett, Packard, Clark), much less the buildings built with money from the Stanford Engineering Venture Fund, which is run by any number of top-tier VCs.
That quote in the story is from Tom Reindfleisch if I recall, in an internal university memo. Like they wouldn't have axes to grind internally, or want to influence future policy. Always, always remember the context of quotes, especially in media-driven stories like this one.
Stanford these days takes equity holdings or cash. The Office of Technology Licensing happens to hold the licensing rights for the DNA polymerase chain reaction (PCR) which is the basis for most biotech. They make millions/billions of dollars for the university endowment every year. I wouldn't fault them for guessing wrong 20 years ago about the potential of two wackos who were (apparently at the time) bilking the university for some intellectual property.
Having worked for a University's computing department for a number of years as a student, both general computing and for the business school - I can tell you it is very common for schools to gobble up the technology created by students and in turn look for business opportunities
OTOH, I definitely used "work-time" to work on outside projects (thanks telnet), so I guess it goes both ways.
Interesting, but also funny. Yeager and crew begets Cisco. What did Yeager base his code on? Thin air? I doubt it, but I have no idea.
In the same way this article then credits Berners-Lee with the founding of the WWW concept. Again, from thin air? Ah, no. I've heard that groups at DEC pitched WWW like system for Notes to Tim, and I'm sure there are others that I've never seen credited.
In these reworkings of history we seem to like to back up just one step previous to some rich/famous/infamous person and say "Ah hah!". Is that really helping? I guess so. Maybe it is better to just credit the guy who made a name for himself/herself off the thing, wink, and be done with it.
- ordinarius