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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."
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!
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.
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
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!!!
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.