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The 3Com Saga
prostoalex writes "A flashback to 5 years ago reveals 3Com as a global multi-billion dollar company, respected and revered around the world. Today Bob Metcalfe's creation is a money-losing $2 billion dollar operation trying to find its niche. The 3Com Saga from Network World magazine takes a look at the history of 3Com Corp."
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Yeah I'd probably agree - all in all, intel cards give good performance, and generally just work with linux - and these days it's pretty easy to find motherboards with intel nics built in, as you mentioned, which suits me just fine since I have had the best linux performance/reliability over the years using intel chipsets & cpus.
Fast forward to around 2001, when cards based on Intel and "Tulip" chips gained better driver support, started performing comparably to 3COM cards, and were significantly lower-priced. 3COM simply lost their competitive advantage. I think that most network cards are beginning to push the limits of the defined standards for 10/100 NICs, so 3COM will have to find a new arena in which to innovate if they want to regain their dominance.
My blog
US Robotics secured major tax incentives from my town (Mt. Prospect, IL) and was expected to employ many engineers, etc.
Shortly after 3Com acquired USR, they abandoned that facility, and it lay idle (and earning little tax for the community) for more than a year. It's now occupied by Skil/Dremel, and I wouldn't be surprised if further tax incentives were given to move them in.
Sure, USR was getting to be a dinosaur when they were acquired (what's a modem without a cable, these days?), but 3Com really abandoned us here.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I had the (mis) fortune to work on an old 3Com Netbuilder router, way back in 1995. It was the first router I'd ever configured, so I didn't know any better. Let me just tell you..what a complete piece of CRAP! To start with, the damn thing booted off a FLOPPY DISK!!! Lost your disk?..sorry, no routing for you. It went downhill from there..lame menus, totally non-intuitive commands, after a few days I wanted to throw that piece of $h!T into the parking lot and drive over it with my car. Fortunately, my second experience was with a cisco 2500, and there was no looking back from there. I'd run across 3Com switches every once in a while too, and they were total crap as well. The last ones I worked on about 6 months ago, I still have no idea why 802.1Q tagging is working, even though the lame-ass web interface says it's shut off. If 3Com wants to get back into the enterprise market..PLEASE make products that don't use a web-interface. Or if they do, at the very least make what shows up in the web interface at least RESEMBLE what you find in the CLI. And speaking of CLI's, how about a "write terminal" command, so you can actually look at the damn config without having to poke thru 49 different menus, writing the settings down each step along the way. That's why I always tell people who need switches..buy cisco if you've got the money, or HP procurve if you don't. 3Com..seriously, STOP MAKING CRAPPY ROUTERS AND SWITCHES!!!!!
Are you being sarcastic? Most built-in ethernet controllers use 3com chipsets, and all that's done for me is make my life a LOT easier to deal with, because you only have to really worry about 3 chipsets after that: a builtin 3com, a builtin intel (though they seem to be appearing less and less frequently now) and maybe the tulip driver for netgears for 3-4 year old PCs.
Don't forget the Realtek chips - 90% of the motherboards I've bought have them built in.
My experience with 3com is that manufacturing quality is extremely bad and design is at least questionable.
.25mm space to a grounded plate and on touching the main chip was fried. Anyway, the switch chip grew so hot before, that it would probably not have lived long.
First example: We had 10 3com network cards, with consecutive serial numbers. Some were faster, some slower and some killed the router interfaces because they produces so many errors. This points to extremely high tolerances in chip manufature and very poor Q/A.
Second example: A 100Mbit switch, for office use. Because it had a substandard coil in a switching regulator it produced highly anoying noise. A replacement switch had the same problem. When I fixed it myself (by adding a filter capacitor that was part of the original design, but obviously removed to save money, in a higher price product!), I killed the switch, because the leads of a power semiconductor were not cut short enough. There was maybe
My bottom line: Whatever you need, don't buy 3com. Any no-name product out of Asia is better quality.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Have you hugged your penguin today?
Yeah, it seems like it was only within the last year that an x86 motherboard had the "priviledge" of having a 3Com network chip on it. The reviewers remarked that previously 3Com chips were only available as an add-on 3Com branded card such as a PCI card.
Every computer I've bought in the last eight years had a network card built into the mainboard. I guess they were out of the running for my systems by default. Any time I needed a supplementary card or one to put in someone else's system, I had no familiarity with them, so I just stuck with what I knew would work. Sticking with the same brand chips as what's already in the system also netted a benefit of not having to load yet another set of drivers.
yea palm was founded in 1992, and in 1993 came out with the zoomer", it costs 700$ and competed against the newton, and sharp and toshibas product lines as well. Nobody really ever bought a zoomer.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
In my book, 3com is still respected and revered
but in my experience so far, overpriced. or were, anyhow. When I signed up to Broadband a couple of years back, the installation engineer couldn't get a 10/100 to install in my box, so he zipped out to the van and got a 3Com 10-baseT card and installed that. went smoothly, right up until I got the invoice.
the 10Base-T was more than three times the cost of the faster card from a competitor, which incidentally I went out and bought later and installed in like 5 minutes. But Telstra's crappy service is another story.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
I work techinical support for an isp. half the time I ask what NIC they're using, it's an intel something or another.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Posting as AC for job protection
I work for NCR, a technology company that is a century plus old.
Some founders of other big shot companies learned all the tricks in the school of this company, like Watson, who later founded IBM
NCR was always a conservative styled company, focussed on profit and not growth.
Despite that, we had our share of innovation. NCR invented the now ubiquitous SCSI standard. It also invented the first commercially available 32-bit processor.
Because they are conservative, they never broke into markets they had products for earlier than anyone else. The 32-bit processor ended up powering minis and mainframes made by NCR, and another company in the UK, and that is it.
NCR used to make disks and storage arrays, printers, microelectronics, and much more.
After the AT&T merger in the early 1990s, the old guard management was replaced and a clown by the name of Jerre Stead was brought in. He was more like a TV evangelist than a CEO, and left the company in ruins.
Jerre sold off the storage business (later to become Symbios and now LSI Logic), the microelectronics, and the printers.
After the trivestiture (AT&T spinning off Lucent and NCR), a Swedish guy by the name of Lars Nyberg was brought in. He announced that NCR was exiting the PC business, then later the server business, then we stopped making computers altogether.
The whole dot com era just passed us by, with nothing affecting us positively.
I think the idea was to make us attractive by being profitable, so someone will buy us. However, this did not pan out.
We are not losing money, but I doubt that we will survive for much longer. There are no new products being designed, no R&D spending, outsourcing to India is the name of the game.
This down spiral happened to other companies. For example Sperry Univac became Unisys, and now they are not really into computers. Data General, Bull, Bouroughs, DEC,
NCR will cease to exist soon in my opinion.
It really hurts to see a company going down like this from its former greatness.
I agree. Try getting a switch replaced under warranty. Their response "You ship your switch in and you'll get a new one in about 20 days". Good way to make people want to buy more of your product. I can't stand 3com. Dell had me a new switch, it was around the same size/warranty status, for another client in 5 hours. That was impressive. Even HP has a lifetime warranty and will get you a switch out overnight.
And you know this MAN!!!
Typically an onboard chip/network card will use more proccesor and memory resources then a regular add in card
This is absolute bull. Whether a PCI ASIC is built-in to motherboard or on an add-in card makes 0 difference to performance.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Your book must be really short.
I like 3Com NIC's. Been solid and supported in every OS I've used them in.
Then there's the switching gear. Horrible CLI. Prone to lockups.
I know of a large university that got stranded by 3Com. Their network is ATM backbone, Corebuilder 9000's, etc. Turns out that their particular setup exposes a nasty little bug in the OS, causing the whole core to lock up every 2 or 3 days. Has to be powered cycled to get it going again.
So they call support. Support says "So sorry, we dropped support for our Enterprise equipment last week, the service contract you've been paying isn't worth the paper the purchase order was written on anymore. Thanks for calling, have a nice life".
Last I heard, they had been dealing with this for 3 years due to lack of funding. They did this to a LOT of people. 3Com will not be getting business from me anytime soon.
The palm saga is prety interesting as well. After 3Com sold ~20% of Palm in an IPO the total value of the 80% they retained was significantly higher value than the whole of 3Com's value. It would be like only giving MS a total value of $40 billion when they have $50 billion in the bank. As I recall they gave the rest of the shares to then current 3Com shareholders. So any measure of 3Com's value should adjust for the palm spinoff (either by reducing older values or adding Palm to the business.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Why would you buy a network card when nearly every mainboard has one built-in?
Maybe because their onboard LAN ports suck. I know mine does. You know what the MAC address of my SiS onboard Ethernet was? 00-00-00-00-00-00. Man, SiS is pathetic. I'm not entirely sure what the chipset is tho (the onboard sound has an Intel chipset, so that could also be true for the Ethernet). Why? Because I've had it disabled in the BIOS for months. As soon as I saw the bogus MAC address, I ran out and bought a Realtek card which has worked perfectly since.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
I did considerable work on that product while at Ford Aerospace. Basically, I had to overhaul TCP, and wrote ICMP and UDP from scratch. We used this internally within Ford, but couldn't sell it or give it away, since UNET was proprietary.
Bill Joy's TCP implementation in BSD came years later. But because he was funded to give it away, it became popular, even though it sucked until the second release of 4.3BSD.
Ummm.. In my part of the world, we get somewhat better response than this. But, more importantly, 3Com offer a lifetime warranty on their smaller edge switches (610, 630, 3300, etc...) so, although I don't know what a lifetime is, I have had 6 year old switches replaced 'under warranty'. Who am I to complain?
I'm not sure who you're buying your 3Com phones from.... As a authorized NBX Voice Reseller, I can tell you that the 2102 Phone (previouse gen, no license req), retails for more like $375. The new 3102 hardware goes for about the $299 you mentioned, but the license is only $125. Also, if your 3102 phone dies out of warranty, you do NOT need to replace the license, it is tied to your call processor, not the phone. Also, if your call processor dies, 3Com will reissue any licenses you can provide proof of purchase for.
You have a server and want redundant connections, you need 1000tx with Ethernet frames and 1000tx with Jumbo frames and you want to load balance both interfaces. Therefore, you need two dual port network cards. If you have a busy remote boot network for your Unix machines, you can have two interfaces, one for pseudo disk I/O and the other for the production network.
BTW we are buying Intel NICs because they have good teaming and are very well supported by Cisco and others.
Your Average Joe
SCSI was just a rework of SASI (and, in the very early days, they were compatible). And SASI was...
(drum role)
Shugart Associates Standard Interface
And, at the time, Shugart didn't have shit to do with NCR. Al Shugart started with IBM, and founded Shugart in 1973. He founded Seagate in '79.
Shugart teamed up with NCR in, what, 1981 to have ANSI standardized the interface, renaming it to SCSI.
But the "invention" belongs to Shugart, and not NCR.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061